… and then there is Mediocre Definition, as demonstrated ably by the Babylon 5 DVDs. Even on a standard definition display, they are quite poor picture quality wise.

That's not good

Some difference in the region of the discs, or the region they were transferred from?

Better yet, have you Googled it?

I know the reason. POtted version. B5 was filmed on film in wide screen format. The idea was that it could be transferred to a HD format.

Special effects done to NTSC 4:3 format, the idea being that when the HD/Wide Screen version was needed, they could be re-rendered. The files for the effects were lost in the mean time . So any scene on the DVD which has CGI elements (this seems to include captions and credits) are taken from the NTSC 4:3 composites, which are upscaled so that they will fit in the 16:9 format. The result on PAL is awful as NTSC has fewer horizontal lines.

Result: poor image quality on a lot of scenes, even between cuts in the same scene.

Friggin' hell, is it even worth watching like that? Could you send/take them back if it came down to it?

No - I’ve had the DVDs for a long time. It’s a well known problem with them. I just think it’s ironic that a show that was planned to be easily transitioned to HD is likely never to have this happen, yet the original Star Trek was transitioned without any forward planning by the original producers.

I wanted to see what older films generally looked like in BR-vision recently, but the local rental store only has films going back a couple of years, and I know as soon as I buy an older film for like £6 they'll come out with the super-duper, snazzy, banned-in-Australia edition