Well if it’s an upscale, what’s the point?
Less compression and no MPEG2 artifacts. Lossless audio. Night of the Doctor (the only other televised 8th Doctor appearance). That’s about it. Probably not worth a rebuy for most, but a better product than the DVD.
Is the Blu-ray video encoded as clean progressive frames, no interlacing or field-blending?
I believe it’s the same as the PAL DVD master.
Because 25 fps is not a blu-ray standard (and they for some reason wanted to present it at 25), it’s 50i, which of course is a blu-ray standard. They most likely did what they did for Spearhead, “‘Spearhead’ was originally shot and edited at 25fps, as befits a UK television production, so was remastered at 25 progressive frames per second, or 25P as it is known colloquially. However, the Blu-ray standard doesn’t include 25P, so it is presented on Blu-ray at 50i (50 interlaced fields per second), which is the norm for this sort of material. As both fields originate from the same point in time (ie the same film frame), there is no real difference between 50i and 25P in this case.”
I haven’t read this whole thread. But I’m aware that some have claimed that there’s frame blending on every version released so far. Do we actually know this to be the case for the PAL SE DVD? Given that it’s simply a sped up version of the 24 fps film, it doesn’t need any frame blending (which is not to say they haven’t screwed with it anyway). The NTSC DVD of course is afflicted.
I’d be happy to check against an example frame from the PAL DVD if you have a time stamp and screenshot as example.