I don't have Peacock. Does anyone with Peacock find the quality to be "near-HD"? (I watched SAVED BY THE BELL through a temporary Stack subscription in Canada.)
The DVD compression for SLIDERS on the Universal discs was not particularly high for a DVD release. I previously said it was; I was mistaken.
Seasons 2 - 3 look fine as 35mm film transferred to 540 line digital videotape, Seasons 4 - 5 look good as 16mm film transferred to 540 line digital videotape.
The blurriness of Season 1's second to ninth episodes is not from DVD compression; the low-compression SD blu-ray release from Germany is even blurrier. The problem is that the film was transferred to low resolution videotape for editing and special effects and with incorrect interlacing on "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw"; the even and odd fields were swapped by mistake and created jagged edges, flickering lines and increased blur when DVD and blu-ray players attempt to deinterlace the image.
The SD blu-ray of the Season 1 episodes, while detelecined to remove the interlacing errors, is blurrier because it's a 540i PAL format which was produced by Universal simply stretching the video format from 480i to 540i and changing the framerate. In contrast, the Season 2 - 5 episodes, transferred from film to high fidelity SD digital videotape for editing and effects, retain much of the film grain quality of the video images thanks to low-compression SD files in the high capacity blu-ray format.
The pilot looks really sharp and defined in the Universal DVD, moreso than any subsequent episode. Seasons 4 - 5 may look superficially sharper, but that's due to larger 16mm film grains adding high edge contrast when downscaled to SD. The pilot, when reviewed through the magnifying glass of AI upscaling, is so crisply defined that I wonder if the pilot episode were actually edited on 35mm film, being a higher budgeted production than the series that followed and designed specifically to sell a weekly series to networks.