Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 6 on Blu-ray last Tuesday gave fans an exciting glimpse at the Deep Space Nine station (setting for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) in high definition. You get to see the station inside and out, even Morn! See below for the DS9 in HD images, plus a discussion about what the future holds for DS9 in HD.

Deep Space Nine in HD

The sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu-ray gives us our best look at the Deep Space Nine station yet. Free of the analog artifacts of the 1990’s post-production process, there are new details and coloring that can be made out on the station hull. We also get a very brief glimpse of sections of the Promenade in “Birthright”.

Check out the different shades and color variations along the hull of the station. The periodic yellow strips along the habitat ring were barely noticeable before.

Click images to enlarge

The Promenade

The Replimat

Morn!

Later in the season we see the runabout used by Picard, Data, Troi, and LaForge in “Timescape.” Sadly the runabout is either rather small in the frame or in motion, so there aren’t any amazingly clear shots to be had.

One last sort of bonus is the coalescent organism from “Aquiel”, which gives us rough idea of what Odo might look like.

The Future of Deep Space Nine and Voyager in HD?

CBS is now wrapping up their work remastering Star Trek: The Next Generation for HD and Blu-ray release. Which brings up the question as to what is next. Seeing Deep Space Nine above just adds to the hope that the entire series of Deep Space Nine would be remastered in the same way. However, the glimpses of DS9 seen on TNG Season 6 may be the only ones we will get in HD (at least for the near future).

One has to bear in mind the huge expense that CBS went to with remastering Next Generation. Due to the video post-production process used in the 80’s and 90’s they had to essentially recreate the entire post-production process to make TNG in HD, and that is very expensive. The same expensive process for TNG would have to be done for remastering Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (and Star Trek: Voyager for that matter). Star Trek: Enterprise – which was recently released on Blu-ray – didn’t have this issue because it was originally shot and broadcast in HD, so there was no remastering required.

While some fans may take this as a time to ramp up a good old fashioned campaign with social media and petitions, currently the best way to support the rest of the franchise getting the re-mastering treatment it deserves is to buy Star Trek: The Next Generation Blu-ray sets (and TOS and Enterprise sets as well), watching the remastered episodes on Amazon (they’re the only ones to have Seasons 3-5 in HD), and tuning in to the remastered episodes on SyFy in the UK, and the Tuesday night block of remastered episodes on BBC America here in the US.

The cost to do TOS (back circa 2006) and TNG were likely seen as worth it for CBS because TOS and TNG are the two most popular and well known (even to casual fans) series of the Star Trek franchise. So DS9 and VOY would require the same huge resources, but for a much smaller fan base. So you can imagine CBS is gun-shy about committing to seven more seasons of DS9 and then seven more seasons of Voyager.

This is a major shame, CBS Digital has all the right, very talented, people and they have their remastering workflow down pat now, however it appears that this is going to come to an end in just a few weeks when the work on the seventh season of TNG wraps up. TrekMovie will continue to monitor developments and will keep readers in the loop if we hear something different in the coming weeks and months.

TNG IN HD AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

The just released Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Chain of Command” single disc set and the entire 6th season are available on Amazon.

The previous 5 TNG seasons are also available, currently discounted down to as low as $49.99.