Based on community consensus from projects like QueerWorm's DS9 Upscale Guide , these were the target settings for Season 1:
: Many projects upscaled to 4K but ultimately distributed in star trek deep space 9 s01 ai upscale 4k 2020 top
In 2020, community upscalers generally agreed on a specific workflow to get the absolute best results out of DS9 Season 1. If you are looking to experiment with upscaling yourself, these were the top methods established during that peak era: Based on community consensus from projects like QueerWorm's
The 2020 "Top" release (so named because it was considered the best available version of Season 1 at the time) utilized a pipeline centered around . Unlike earlier attempts that simply sharpened noise, this workflow used machine learning models trained on high-resolution film scans of similar era shows. | Pros ✅ | Cons ❌ | |--------|--------|
| Pros ✅ | Cons ❌ | |--------|--------| | Sharper character faces & ship exteriors | No official studio involvement | | Better for large 4K screens | Some fine details may be hallucinated by AI | | Restores some detail lost in compression | Motion artifacts possible in fast action | | Free (fan project) | Inconsistent quality across episodes |
: This project released a full 4K upscale of Season 1 using Topaz Video Enhance AI . They later transitioned to a "1080p+" format for subsequent seasons to balance file size with visual quality, noting that the source DVDs for earlier seasons didn't always respond as well to upscaling as the later ones.
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 S01 AI Upscale 4K (2020) project, widely known as Project Defiant