Does anyone still buy and collect DVDs?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by php111, Sep 25, 2014.

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  1. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    Like all my DVDs to be in black cases. NEW preferably.
     
  2. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    Yes!
    Does a great job. Any smoke riddled cases, I toss. Clean the disc with lighter fuel. Put in new case.
     
  3. BILLONEEG

    BILLONEEG Senior Member

    Location:
    New Jersey
    More DVD's added to my library today. A Walk To Remember / An Affair To Remember / The Big Lebowski / The Big Red One / Cleopatra
    (1934) / The Client / Cobb / The Deer Hunter / Field Of Dreams / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes / The High & The Mighty / Island In The Sky /
    Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection / McLintock / Message In A Bottle / Nights In Rodanthe / The Seven Year Itch / Space Cowboys / Staying
    Alive / The Sting / U.S. Marshals.
    [​IMG]
     
    Grand_Ennui and PhantomStranger like this.
  4. Tim Lookingbill

    Tim Lookingbill Alfalfa Male

    Location:
    New Braunfels, TX
    This thread and the prices I paid for my list of recent DVD purchases posted here just made me realize movies on disc are cheaper than a lot of music CD's considering there is far more risk vs investment making movies. That's some weird economics there.
     
    Eric_Generic likes this.
  5. averica

    averica infinite rider on the big dogma

  6. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    I'm focusing on BD over DVD by far...If I cannot get a BD I will settle for a DVD...One thing I've been noticing lately; on some newer DVD releases they are offering a HD VUDU copy...this was not the occasion a few years ago DVD=SD VUDU copy....
     
    Jrr likes this.
  7. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    What with the recent crisis ( lockdown).I’ll be building another 400/500 dvd shelves. Been trying to stop buying them, but impossible. My blu ray rack is full as well ...argh!!!!
     
    Eric_Generic likes this.
  8. Tim Lookingbill

    Tim Lookingbill Alfalfa Male

    Location:
    New Braunfels, TX
    Found out buying the DVD separately from the BD on the Wizard Of Oz 75th Anniversary 2013 restoration disabled frame by frame advance on the Blu-ray. The DVD, no problem. I bought both to see a difference in image quality especially comparing online screengrabs that show color differences which I didn't find between both formats.

    I did find out that the Blu-ray viewed on my 32 inch Samsung 720p HDtv looked sharper than the DVD both at the same 20 level sharpness on my Samsung. The color is gorgeous on both.

    [​IMG]

    CRAP! Flickr applies compression on hotlinked images. I swear the blu-ray is sharper viewed on the Flickr site.
     
  9. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    Sometimes I let my pocket decide.
     
  10. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    ...is there a PQ difference between the 70th & the 75th Blu-ray editions?
     
  11. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    logical!
     
  12. Warner did an 8K scan for that Blu-ray. It looks even better on UHD.

    The Wizard of Oz 4K UHD Review
     
  13. Jord

    Jord Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Netherlands
    I think dvd's (including blu rays) are mostly worth it if you have a decent tv and like to watch a movie multiple times. That being said I have both and a pretty big dvd/blu ray collection. I like to own movies and watch them when I want without having torely on a streaming service/internet connection etc. Plus, the image quality of a good Blu Ray looks stunning. Every time I pop in a Pixar Blu Ray I'm stunned.
    Part of the reason why I started collection is also probably due to the fact that when I was younger we didn't have much VHS movies and didn't visit the movie theatre option. Having to wait until a movie is shown on TV is a long, long wait. The utter convenience of being able to watch a movie I like whenever I want is something I truly, truly treasure. Every time I watch a DVD it's amazing. I've been recently watching the Munsters on DVD for example and the only time I could see the Munsters when I was younger is to catch the odd episode here and there on the BBC. Now I own every episode of the show, in amazing quality and I can watch it whenever I want. That is just amazing.
     
  14. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    B&M stores closed now. Can’t buy any physical media. Had to dip into my vast DVD collection watched A History Of Violence ( 2005) the other night.
     
  15. Tim Lookingbill

    Tim Lookingbill Alfalfa Male

    Location:
    New Braunfels, TX
    Actually from what I've compared against dvdbeaver.com's screengrabs and that 4K HD version PhantomStranger linked to, your TV will do so much to change the look for good or bad. That's one of the reasons I photograph my HDtv instead of linking to screengrabs. I've actually taken a screengrab of Wizard Of Oz 4K (sharpest one I could find) which shows it too reddish, soft, dark and saturated and edited to match what I see on my TV which is much sharper because I set sharpness to 20. The screengrabs are similar to master audio that sounds different on systems that aren't close to reference monitor.

    I've operated scanners and researched film scanners when I first went digital and I can assure you the ability to capture detail on small format 35mm is quite limited. Large format 8x10/4x5 for landscapes is phenomenal. So there's not much you can pull out of a 70 or 75 year old piece of grainy 35mm film except maybe make the grain more sharp (not too good). TV, viewer's distance and sharpness slider does a better job at least on my Samsung which I eyeball calibrated.

    There's also the issue with HDtv's whose Contrast vs Brightness slider graduates midrange into highlights differently (as in compression) depending on which slider this behavior is engineered into that can make an image pop and have much more clarity. I discovered this over on the long SHF Star Wars Blu-Ray thread where someone posted blowouts of a backlit cloudy sky scene where I tested my disc by adjusting Contrast instead of Brightness and the blowouts revealed a lot cloud detail that wasn't there until I instead adjusted Contrast. On other HDtv's they put this feature on either slider.

    It really makes a difference than what you see in online screengrabs that look too dark, soft and saturated. But really this stuff is all good. If you don't like the look HDtv's have better adjustments than I have in my $800 digital image editor.

    The DVD's have thicker edge detail that gets thicker when using sharpening on an HDtv. IOW they don't respond as well to tv sharpeners as does Blu-ray. Sitting farther back can help.
     
    Mr Bass likes this.
  16. Tim Lookingbill

    Tim Lookingbill Alfalfa Male

    Location:
    New Braunfels, TX
    Here's the difference between what you see of online Blu-ray screengrabs vs. what HDtv settings can change. The one on the left is a screengrab of a high quality preview in my Raw converter of a shot of my HDtv that looks very close to what I saw. And on the right is a screengrab of the actual 1080p Blu-Ray from "Movie Screencaps".

    The Wizard of Oz (1939) - Movie Screencaps.com

    [​IMG]
     
  17. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    so do you have any idea if there is a difference between the 70th & 75th editions...Blu-rays?
     
  18. Tim Lookingbill

    Tim Lookingbill Alfalfa Male

    Location:
    New Braunfels, TX
    I only have one Blu-ray disc and it's the 75th Anniversary and the DVD is also the same designation. The image quality on my Samsung both look the same in color, not in sharpness. I've come to understand examining the packaging and special bonus features that the copyright changes don't seem to coincide with the anniversary year. The copyright change is only for the extra features. An online search makes it even more confusing how to tell if more restoration was applied to give it the updated anniversary number.

    Both DVD and BD I bought have the "Wizard Of Oz 75th Anniversary" logo on the back of the disc case that requires a high powered magnifying glass to clearly see the number "75". And doing an image search on this logo comes up with several version designs. It's exhausting trying to figure out which one I was buying. And to make matters even more confusing the DVD bounding box frame playing on my MacMini DVD player software shows it to be 70th Anniversary. Here's a shot I took of the covers of both DVD and BD.

    [​IMG]
     
  19. Michael likes this.
  20. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

  21. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    I wandered into a FYE store sometime last year and, rifling through their cheap DVDs saw a copy of PATHS OF GLORY from MGM in 1999. I'm a Kubrick fan but have never managed to see PATHS OF GLORY, so I thought for less than $5, I could finally watch the movie and decide if I really liked it enough to upgrade it to Blu-ray or something.

    Well, it sat on my shelf for a good year, and recently, with the passing of Kirk Douglas, I thought I'd give the disc a spin.

    [​IMG]

    If you look hard in the lower left corner of the rear, you'll see:
    SCREEN FORMAT
    STANDARD
    VERSION
    Theatrical release format

    OK, the movie was made with an open matte, so it should have extra info on top and bottom as it was supposed to be screened at 1.66:1. Well, I can live with that, it should just be like a 4:3 TV show.

    So I put the movie into my Sony DVD player, playing on my Sony TV, where every TV show that's 4:3 looks proper 4:3 with pillar bars on the sides. But this movie didn't do that. After the menu, it immediately expanded to a 16:9 image. And the UA logo was bumping up on the top of my TV screen.

    Then the opening credits started. They were not centered top to bottom, instead they were up too high. When the movie started, the heads of the generals were often bumping up against the top of the screen, and in some cases cut off. Obviously, something was wrong with the aspect ratio, so I began investigating, rather than watching the movie.

    I checked all of the TV settings for aspect ratio. The choices on Sony are Normal, Full, Zoom, and Wide Zoom. This had defaulted to Full, so I tried "Normal". What I got was a narrow image with the heads still chopped off. Zoom just made it worse, as did Wide Zoom.

    OK, so it must be a Blu-ray player function. I dug into the Blu-ray player's menu and told it that my screen was 4:3. Again, I got a squished picture with thin people with their heads cut off. Nothing I did within the Blu-ray's menus made any difference. I could not recover the top of the picture in any setting.

    I sort of gave up at that point and decided to post about it online and see if anyone knew of this problem, but this DVD from 1999 is so old, that no-one who ever owned one probably ever played it on a Blu-ray player. I popped the disc into my computer's DVD drive to try to post an example of what I was seeing, and the darned thing played properly in a 4:3 frame. Next I hooked up an old DVD-only player to a TV, and it played properly that way too. Something about the authoring on this old disc just wouldn't play right with the Blu-ray players in my house.

    Anyway, tired of fighting with this, and becoming more intrigued with the movie as I kept sampling it, I went ahead and bought the Criterion Blu-ray which looks magnificent. I think that had the old DVD played properly, the outcome might still have been the same, as I would have wanted an upgrade to the film. I've still not gotten to just sit down and watch, but that's coming soon.

    Anyone need a DVD of PATHS OF GLORY?
     
  22. altaeria

    altaeria Forum Resident

    I like to shoplift DVDs from Rite Aid's bargain rack as often as possible. Does that qualify?
     
    Silver Surfer likes this.
  23. BILLONEEG

    BILLONEEG Senior Member

    Location:
    New Jersey
    Oh, God! / Oh, God! Book II / Steel Magnolias / Walker Texas Ranger TV Movie Collection / War Room
    [​IMG]
     
  24. Dirkwkirk

    Dirkwkirk Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ohio
    Just got Fargo to watch while on the stationary bike. And a few months back I bought Thief with James Caan. Showing my age here.
     
  25. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    many movies not available on Blu-ray still...Mickey Blue Eyes!
     
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