My favorite television show of all time is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year, and in addition to making me feel old as I can remember watching the original airings of these episodes; they’re celebrating it by kicking off the Blu-Ray release of the entire series. Season One of Star Trek: The Next Generation his Blu-Ray this Tuesday and unless you’re a hardcore fan of the series and already own all seven seasons on DVD, you’re probably wondering why it’d be worth upgrading to the new HD version. Here are five reasons why this isn’t simply a repackaging of your current DVDs…

True HD Remastering

Instead of just taking the old, rather soft, footage that was used to create the DVDs from a decade ago; CBS underwent a momentous task to truly recreate the entire series literally from the ground up for the high-def release. They scanned the original camera negatives of every episode to create the high definition transfer used on the Blu-Ray, and the result is the show looking better than it even did when originally broadcast twenty five years ago. You’ve never seen TNG look like this.

Unaltered Episodes

Unlike the Original Series remastering, which completely re-did all of the special effects and in some cases changed them drastically, the Next Gen remastering isn’t changing anything at all. Instead, the original elements are simply being recomposited in high def. Some things that were originally created on standard def video, such as planets and phasers, have been recreated from scratch but are faithful to the originals. Effects that were done with CGI, such as the Crystalline Entity, were also recreated completely. I’d imagine later season’s episodes, such as Tin Man or Galaxy’s Child, will also feature some recreated CG creatures.

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