Helped me finish the run.

Has anyone ordered these recently, I just want to know if they will come in the digipak or the new repackaged slim set as I have season 1-6 in the slim sets and I want them to look right on my shelf.

these are from 1993 so I doubt that they are the latest ones..

DG

That's the year the show premiered. I don't think DVD even existed in '93

I looked at S1 for $13.99 and it was listed as 6 discs. The original packaging had 7 discs, so it's probably the slimpack which is missing the bonus disc. The Ultimate Edition has the slimpacks and the bonus discs, AFAIK. Considering I passed on the Ultimate Edition for under $100 at Sam's Club mainly because I was never impressed by the graininess of the DVD transfers, I'm waiting for the Blu-Ray set to get in the low $100s ballpark... yes, that will be a while as it hasn't been announced or released yet, but I don't mind waiting a few years. I liked but did not love The X-Files. I'd rather spend my time on Lost, Monk, and several other series I'm way behind on.

I'll also mention that Amazon had the slimpacks for $12.49 each last November, so it's not a particularly good deal.

I've seen the first two seasons packaged together and selling for $20 at either Walmart or Target within the past year, should this be a help for anyone.

My bad these were release January 31, 2006

DG

Oh man.

I love the assumption a 4:3 show will get a Blu-ray release. Its been 4 years now and Fox has already released both movies on Blu-ray. The time to release the show would have been last year when the second film hit BD. As it stands, catalog TV on BD is failing and nearly all studios have canceled plans to bring previous Seasons of shows out on the format. Even most shows still on the air don't have previous Seasons available (Smallville, House, The Office, etc.). We're talking a huge commitment from Fox to get 9 Seasons of a show out on Blu-ray that is readily available for $15 a Season or free through Netflix.

*(Only a few shows still on the air got previous Seasons releases, like Lost and Supernatural. And only a few 'classic' shows got a release like Star Trek TOS and some other randomness from smaller studios who happen to have a few good shows in their catalog, like Twilight Zone).

Plus the X-Files may have been one of those series that was filmed but edited on video, resulting in a less-than-stellar image that Blu-Ray would make much more apparent. Blu-Ray as a step-up only works for filmed releases: as a way to boost catalog earnings for television its a remarkable failure. It would have been better to use the extra space for putting whole seasons on one disc instead of increasing the picture.

Walmart was selling the first six seasons in slimpacks for $15 apiece just a month or two ago (bundling the first four in two-packs for $30). If you don't jump on it now, you can wait and get them some other time. Strangely enough, I managed to sell off my digipaked releases earlier this year for $200 for the lot, so I don't feel that bad about upgrading to slimpaks.

It'll be several years (if ever) before studios start putting DVD Content on a BD disc just to cut down on DVD discs inside a case. It's a nightmare because Blu-ray represents the best possible Picture and Audio, and to toss a Season of X-Files on 2 BDs at a low price would hurt the market. It's akin to those Mill Creek DVD sets that for $20 you get a few Seasons of some 80's show for $20.

Now, with that being said, I wonder what Simpsons Season 13 will look like on Blu-ray when it's released next week. That's from 2001 (?), will be 4:3, and will be able to squeeze all 24 episodes onto 2 discs easy (if not 1...). I bought S20 for $15 and was pretty happy with the HD episodes. I have not bothered to even start the 4:3 ones.

Have a look for yourself here:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/blu-r...13_blu-ray.htm

Also, it is apparently three discs (to the 4 of the DVD version), not just two....

I saw the complete series set at Sams Club recently for $125, included all 9 sets, all the mythology discs and some other extras.

Oh bleh. 1.77 is an odd ratio and the PQ isn't all that great. If I can get it for $15 I'd bite. Thanks for the link.

When/where did you find Simpsons Season 20 Blu-Ray for $15? I must've missed that deal because I surely would've jumped on it.

I also guess I may have been optimistic about the X-Files not knowing they were shot on video. I thought they switched to 16x9 sometime during the run, but I don't know as I only got to season 5 or so (the haunted house episode) when I got frustrated and took a long break. Of course I remember when VGA first came out and I thought "nobody is ever going to make games using 256 colors" and they went way beyond that. So I think as long as Blu-Ray doesn't die any time soon, everything will make it to Blu-Ray eventually. I guess it just might be a longer wait than I had hoped. Another thing I've learned is that some studios (MGM in particular?) would release 2 DVD-5s and call them deluxe 2 disc editions when they could've fit them on 1 DVD-9. Wasn't Escape from New York one of those? (Not sure) They did it because they thought having more discs would make it more valuable, so I'd be surprised if studios ever tried to fill BD-50s as much as they could. Numerous recent BD-50 movies only fill maybe 30-40GB total. If you have an extra 10 GB, why not increase the bitrate of the movie for even better video quality? Answer: they're lazy and/or don't care.

Maybe I should've bought the X-Files Ultimate set I saw at Sam's for $90 (weird how their stores seem to have different prices), but it still felt expensive especially when I remembered how grainy some of the episodes were when I watched them. Hopefully I'll see a better deal someday.

Or why not release an entire season of X-Files in standard def on 1 blu-ray disc - much nicer for the environment! The entire series could fit on 8 blu-rays (standard def) and take up as much space on the shelf as The Prisoner or a single season of Star Trek TOS. Price it at $40 and I'd grap it in a heartbeat! --Peter

I would love it if studios would start doing this. It'll never happen. Try explaining to consumers why this Blu-ray disc requires a Blu-ray player, yet looks just the same as a DVD. And as GizmoDVD says, with just 1-disc, there'll be a perceived lack of value.

Actually, Blu-Ray only represents the best possible image right now. There's room to expand there and as I noted, it depends on the source material. When Blu-Ray is on its way out in a few years, we might see companies putting entire runs of shows on a few discs just to justify and expand the sales of the dying medium.

Honestly, I see Blu-Ray as a transitional medium. It's not a bad innovation, but it hasn't taken off like DVD has. Part of that is the economy, but another part is the frustration and lack of standardization that most LCD TVs suffer from. Plus, storage mediums have nowhere to go but up.

The X-Files DVDs have nowhere to go but down. SD DVD, unless its new, always trends downward.

I think it would just be more confusion. A lot of people don't care about the layers on a disc but would be baffled why this disc can hold more and why this one looks good and by that point they simply have lost interest. At this point in Blu-Ray's lifespan, it's starting to look like a version of laserdisc: nicer images, but not enough innovation to really create a new standard like DVD did. The next step--that presumably adds more space onto a disc--will probably be the next standard that has an opportunity to gloss over Blu-Ray's image-based marketing and move into pushing whole seasons and better quality as a dual selling point.

Actually, it was shot on film but the post-production was done using video.