This project by Joel Hruska at ExtremeTech extensively documented the technical hurdles of the task. He focused on addressing "variable frame rate" issues inherent in the original DVDs to improve motion clarity.
Project Defiant (also known as the DS9 Upscale Project) and JoyBell/UTRCorp releases were the primary fan-driven efforts to upscale Star Trek: Deep Space Nine star trek deep space 9 s01 ai upscale 1080p 2020 2021
: Focused on a 960p VBR (Variable Bit Rate) output. This project prioritized avoiding "hallucinated" details often seen in aggressive 4K upscales, maintaining a look closer to the original broadcast while sharpening edges. This project by Joel Hruska at ExtremeTech extensively
If you love DS9, seek out the 2020-2021 AI upscale of Season 1. It won't replace a phantom CBS remaster, but it will let you finally read the labels on the bottles behind Quark’s bar. And sometimes, that’s enough. And sometimes, that’s enough
In some shots, the intricate detail of the Defiant or the massive Dominion War fleets became clearer. In others, the AI struggled to differentiate between a ship and the black void of space, sometimes creating "ringing" artifacts or oversharpening the glow of photon torpedoes. However, for many fans, the trade-off was acceptable: a slightly artificial VFX shot was preferable to an indistinguishable blob of pixels.