DVD details for
Blue Velvet (1986) More at IMDbPro »

A box of selected work by director David Lynch including Eraserhead remastered edition, the Eraserhead CD soundtrack, The Short Films of David Lynch, Blue Velvet with a newly remixed 5.1 track by David Lynch, Wild at Heart, The Elephant Man, the animated serial Dumbland, and making its DVD debut, Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted. In addition will be a Mystery Disc- including several exclusive Lynch originals. Also included in the set will be original Lynch extras not before available on previous DVD editions. Finally, set includes a booklet featuring rare Lynch imagery.

Michel Hafner (6 October 2000):
Blue Velvet (1986) by 'David Lynch' is now available from MGM on this 16:9 enhanced DVD. A landmark DVD for a landmark film? Unfortunately not.
The film master used is in fine shape and pretty clean. Image steadiness is good.
"Blue Velvet" is a dark movie with sometimes intense colors. So proper color and contrast rendition are crucial. It's not in this area that this DVD fails since color and contrast are indeed quite good. Blacks are deep and there's nice shadow detail. Colors are highly saturated where required and look fine throughout.
Image sharpness, though, is not satisfying at all. This 16:9 DVD is another one of these fake enhanced DVDs which are merely interpolated from a letterbox master instead of created in true anamorphic fashion from the film master. Or to put it differently, MGM chose the cheap route and recycled an old transfer, hiding their naughty bits with a 16:9 fig leave.
The next hint that this is a recycled transfer comes from the amount of aliasing artifacts present. Wherever there are high frequencies (such as straight lines) severe aliasing is visible (staircase artifacts, moiré). In addition there are DVNR artifacts and ringing around high contrast contours. A veil of video artifacts is cast over most of the footage, causing this DVD to look more often than not like video instead of like film.
The noise and grain level is mostly moderate but also not state of the art.
Finally MGM could not be bothered to pay for a dual layer DVD and had everything squeezed onto one layer. To be fair it must be said that compression is nonetheless good and not the quality bottleneck of this DVD. But more bits would not have hurt in any case.
The soundtrack has not been remastered to DD 5.1.
All in all this DVD is disappointing. An important film like "Blue Velvet" deserves a new state of the art transfer. This old recycled transfer is not outright bad, but it can't provide the film look. The video artifacts and fuzzyness are sometimes distracting on high quality displays and the lack of any supplements (except a trailer) further supports the impression that MGM went for a quick buck here. This can't be the last version of this film on DVD. It's simply not good enough. I can't recommend this DVD to anybody that cares about image quality. Better wait for a higher quality reissue.
Addendum September 2003: The best version of this film 'available' so far is the HD transfer broadcast on Showtime. It's great looking with gorgeous colors and deep blacks. It has very little video artifacts. Only sharpness is somewhat disappointing a times. It does full justice to the film.