New to Blu: November 9-15 > TV

Bones at last gets Blu-ray exposure here with this week’s release of season six on the format.

Seasons four and five are on Blu-ray in the US but only have DVD distribution in NZ.

“If you watched these in HD on television, you can look forward a nice bump up over what already looked quite good.”

“Like other Fox shows appearing on Blu-ray, all of the artifacting and other peculiarities associated with the over-compressed network feed from my local cable company are nowhere to be seen on disc.

“Across the episodes, the image appears very sharp, nicely textured and offers up plenty of fine detail.”

If you prefer your mysteries to be more perplexing, season three of Fringe at last is out – as is season two of Supernatural.

“The show looks pretty great on Blu-ray; though the colour palette is very washed-out and subdued, the format handles the darkness of the show’s photography very well, with solid blacks and lots of excellent fine detail in every shot.”

“But it does suffer from the inclusion of a lossy audio presentation that has been present on every season except season six.”

Also new is a limited box set release of True Blood’s first three seasons, BBC favourites Doctor Who (Series 6, Part 2) and Top Gear (Series 16), and two cable-TV documentaries that already have been released here on DVD: Inside Planet Earth and Gettsyburg.

Expect the latter to be more cinematic than most of the History Channel’s output, thanks to Ridley and Tony Scott being the executive producers.

“Perhaps due to the Scott Brothers’ involvement, the recreations here have more of an epic film look than many similar History Channel documentaries.

“Sequences are filtered and desaturated, and several feature freeze frames and other devices.

“Overall, fine detail is exceptional throughout the series, even in some of the strangely filtered segments.”

The week’s only other TV-on-Blu-ray debut is Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Complete Season 3.