Does anyone still buy and collect DVDs?

I miss going into CEX stores, I'd get all sorts of stuff, and trade in things sometimes as well. The website isn't the same, as it's about £1.95 postage per item, so defeats the object of picking up lots of 50p DVDs and £1 Blu-Rays.

EG.

 

Agree on the website. Their policy of not combining shipping is madness.

 

Sony customer service sucks all over, apparently. I suspected as much. The Sony service centre for the eastern U.S. is in Hanover, Pennsylvania. It's un-affectionately known as the Hanover House Of Horrors. You'd think that their motto is fix one thing but break another by their results. On the rare occasion that Sony makes a decent unit, you can count on them to be unable to service them reliably.

 

Sony makes the best TV’s in my opinion. And even though they stopped AVR production do to chip set shortages.. their AVR’s were better than they were given credit for. They were certainly not my go to, but they were very easy to install and very reliable. Sony can be a very good company.. In the age of Blu-Ray players.. they were rock solid and my go to back then.

In truth customer service from the big three TV manufacturers are equally difficult. I have experienced nightmares from all three. It’s like cable/internet service providers.. choose the best product cause they all suck.

 

Blu-rays do turn up in charity shops, but they are far less common and usually not on an xx for £1 deal. I wouldn't be surprised if CEX bought unsold charity shop DVDs. One shop sorted their DVDs and they had several instances of more than copy. Not just 2 or 3 copies, but 6 or 7 copies. They are sometimes as unsellable as Robbie Williams CDs.

 

I, too, have liked their TV sets for the good PQ and great ergonomics. I have a Sony 110 wpc power amp, 55ES is in the model number. It's never been to the shop. It's been in constant use since 1993. I got two of their SACD players back around the year 2ooo. The 5 disc changer worked very well for about 15 years. The single disc unit played SACD's fine but had trouble playing regular CD's. Two trips to Hanover didn't help and after the first trip it came back with the optical output and something else not working. The same sort of thing happened on the second trip. It was a heavy player, about 30-35 pounds, it was expensive to ship it to Hanover from Tennessee. When I was considering a third trip to Hanover, I told the Sony rep that they should pay the $50 shipping charge this time. Of course, Sony refused to do so! They also refused to provide me with another unit. So goes Sony ES's 5 year warranty that's of little consequence. The owner of my Sony dealership worked on it and improved the CD playback some but it never played CD's over about 60 minutes long without mistracking at some point in the second half of the disc. This was a $2000 player. When I replaced it, I went with Marantz and it's been rock solid.

Sony is big and there's some good and bad going on. The guy who started Sony who went by Roy for westerners died back in the 1990's. I think Sony went downhill some after his demise. I found out that the Sony ES warranty didn't mean squat. Sony is a mixed bag....

 

All companies now play leapfrog with the latest and greatest.. they’re all big and move slow. You just have to undue the brand loyalty and stay in step with the pulse of who currently has the they’re act together with at least the engineering.

 

Too much to go into here, but I actually prefer the functionality of the (now discontinued) Oppo players (203/205), which I didn't get a chance to buy before the company shut its U.S. doors, or the Cambridge Audio CXUHD (which I do own and which was a clone of the Oppo UDP-203), over the Panasonics. I owned a DMP-BD10A first generation Panny Blu-ray deck when it was released (we still have it, using it in the bedroom) and Panny DVD players before it, so I am familiar with the brand, but when the UHD 4K Blu-ray players came out, beginning with the brand's UB900, a lot of features were dropped that folks like me with massive DVD collections didn't like. In a nutshell, the Panny players don't offer a zoom feature on the remote (to correct for non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs, of which I have a ton), an aspect ratio control in the setup menu (so 4:3 DVDs could be automatically stretched to fit the screen, the way I prefer them and the way the Oppos and Cambridge allowed for -- as well as the new Reavon players and the discontinued Pioneer LX500/800), a resume playback feature to pick up where you last left off on a disc when you re-insert one (works only if the Blu-ray was authored with a "RESUME: YES/NO" prompt; the Oppos, Cambridge and Reavons allow/allowed you to resume playback of ALL DVDs removed from the player, as well as some Blu-rays), a source direct option (I don't personally need it, but many others do), a power button LED indicator, a way to shut off the stupid automatic power-down that occurs after 20 minutes of sitting idle....I can go on and on.

All of that being said, I'm currently running a UB9000 because it is, at the moment, without peer in terms of build quality (although mine is making a strange vibration/bump noise when the disc drawer closes).

I had the 820 for one evening before I returned it because I didn't feel the $500 asking price was justified given its lightweight plastic chassis.

 

Our first 1080p display, back when "Full HD" took off, was a Sony SXRD rear projection set, and even with a few lamp replacements, this thing served us well for more than a decade before it succumbed to the dreaded optical block failure (it was beginning to show signs of discoloration, mostly in the yellow area). When we jumped into 4K, we picked up a Samsung to replace the Sony because my research had indicated they made a superior flat panel with rich, vibrant color. Suffice to say, we've had a ton of issues with the Sammy, which is why I will probably go back to Sony when we eventually replace it -- gonna probably be one of their OLEDs or a premium FALD.

I just wish their setup interfaces weren't so overwhelming or quasi-complex; compared to the Sonys, the Samsungs are rather easy to set up, with only four or so picture presets to choose from ("Movie" mode being the most accurate, and what we use for serious film watching), while the Sonys offer "Cinema Home, "Cinema Pro," "Custom," "Sports," etc. (the last time I checked). There are also those sub-menus of the Sonys that make things confusing -- for example, you set the contrast, backlight, etc. in a main menu and then you're taken to submenus that ask you to set the same parameters. It reminds me of the Panasonic disc players which also make things unnecessarily complicated.

 

Can’t seem to get their inventory on my iPhone.
They give pennys for some dvds - in trade.

 

Asian languages are sometimes hard to translate easily into English and other European languages and vice-versa. Monty Python demonstrated this in a bit for the extras for The Holy Grail. There's no good way to say Holy Grail in Japanese. The grail cup had to be called the Sacred Chalice. I forget the other examples they had.

 

The problem with any oppo is not having immersion. They are really nothing more than a transport anymore because the AVR will do all the decoding these days, so immersion (Atmos, DTX..) can exist. Immersion is a game changer and a must for any home theater I design. That completely leaves out the old tech that was oppo. I sold my 105 and dont miss it.There was a time when I was a real oppo fan boy starting with my 93. But the tech just didn't keep up. So if you have to go HDMI out and its only a transport.. what use is anything else?

 

Ummmmm.....

What?

 

Not sure what you mean here, but the Oppos will transmit all the latest immersive formats (DTS:X, Dolby Atmos) via bitstream so an AVR can decode them. So what is it that the Oppo 203 and 205 are missing exactly?

Truth be told, I miss my BDP-83 very much. Best DVD player (to say nothing of its outstanding Blu-ray performance) I EVER owned.

 

Yes.. thats what I mean by just being a transport these days. What was special about Oppo was the analog outs.. but since they stop at 7 channel.. its a no go and you're bit streaming. Meaning why have an oppo? You’re not benefiting by its power supply, processing or any other features. These days you only use a good transport and reader.

 

My cheap as chips Sony DVD player is still going strong, a year now .. only $30 bucks.

 

Yes, as I found out after waiting around in their ghastly stores for ages, only to be told an entire box of DVDs (some boxsets) would net me the grand total of 39 pence.

EG.

 

It's in their special features for Holy Grail. They had to work out language for their Japanese releases. You might have this in your disc collection but have never watched this extra...???

 

Best to take to charity shop / give them away or dump them .. assuming space issues.

 

That's what I ended up doing. I don't need that sort of money - rather they went to charity.

EG.

 

Think they make their money on iPhones / tech stuff. I’ve seen some good priced recording mics.. synths sometimes. Again . Subjective to one’s interest.

 

That was a couple of years back - now if I run out of storage space with DVDs, I'll do what I've done with CDs, get those PVC wallets that hold all the artwork as well as the disc. There's no reason to jettison any more of my collection. I used to like adding and removing stuff from my collection, but past that these days.

EG.

 

That’s a good idea.

 

Hey, I'd take that postage rate for those 3D BDs!

I think I actually looked into buying from the site when I returned to the US in 2019, but IIRC, the overseas shipping was so expensive it defeated the purpose...

 

Of course I still collect actual DVD's, new and used. For one thing, with our setup, everything just works. We have a computer connected via HDMI to a 50" LG HDTV and sofyware that means we never have to worry about regions (1, 2, 4 and A and B, it doesn't matter, all of these are in our collection) or PAL/NTSC, it just works. Our TV is HDCP compliant, so we don't know if any discs have that because, again, it just works.

**ahem** I mean .... For one thing, we have a Pioneer BDP-150 universal disc player (with no region for DVD's) and a 50" LG HDTV. The TV is now a bit over 10 years old and still working perfectly (admittedly I cannot say the same thing for the remote control!) so it may be a while before we consider 4K/UHD. Quick side note: We also had an LG DVR (which also had a DVD recorder on board and could record from a composite source) but, about a year ago, the remote control for it broke and suddenly we found it useless and unuseable. The only buttons on the front were "Eject", "Play" and "Power". We couldn't change channels (and we were stuck on a 24 hour news channel) let alone make any new recordings or view our old recordings. All we could do was insert a DVD and hope the menu would default to "Play all" so we could hit play and watch it. It has not been plugged in for a year and, as soon as we work out where to send it, it'll be gone! Stupid remote control. And stupid LG for discontinuing it.

As for what I'm buying, there's two local independant companies doing amazing things. There's ViaVision - who's discs are a bit dodgy, so we back them up as soon as we get them! - who are releasing many great TV shows from the past. For example, they have just re-released "Ironside", of which seasons 5-8 never came out before outside of Australia. Plus in 2018 or 2019 they got the rights to shows from Fremantle Media, which includes Thames TV ("The Bill", "Love Thy Neighbour", "Heartbeat", "Minder") and Grundy Television Australia ("Prisoner", "Sons And Daughters", "The Young Doctors"). They have also released (or re-released) many Australian TV dramas, particularly from the Southern Star (Endomol) catalogue, unfortunately in large, crazy-expensive box sets. Sure, they're a good price if you break it down per disc, but then you're expected to buy two-or-three dozen discs at once ("All Saints", "Blue Heelers", "Police Rescue").

The other one is called Umbrella Entertainment. Over the last several years, they've picked up a lot of rejected movies from Paramount and Universal. But, more importantly, they've released dozens of Australian miniseries and lots of Australian movies, from the standard ("Storm Boy", "The Piano", "We Of The Never Never") to the naughty ("Alvin Purple", "Don's Party") to the downright bizarre and/or terrifying, action packed weirdness ("Patrick", "Stone", "The Chain Reaction", "Body Melt", "The Man From Hong Kong"). Many of these titles have fallen under the Umbrella title (ha ha ha) of "Ozploitation" on DVD, but quite a few are now also coming out on BluRay. I do, however, find it annoying that they often say "From a stunning new 4K transfer" but then they have almost nothing on 4K disc!

So between these two companies, our DVD collection is currently in constant growth. At the moment, I am prioritising the Australian titles (after all, it is where I'm from) and, in particular, the miniseries - many of which were released under the Umbrella title (that dumb joke again?) of Classic Australian Stories. Also, if you include their back catalogue of now out-of-print titles (many of which can still be had for cheap if used) then there is a huge wealth of Australian cinema and miniseries just waiting for you. OK, none of the out-of-print titles are on BluRay in HD, but these are still often treasures. If you love cinema and you're bored with Hollywood, check out the Australian stuff from the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's. Just be warned that our <R> rating is like your [NC-17] rating and when a film is rated <R> it usually deserves it. Although "Alvin Purple" (1973) is much closer to [X]!

Also, as far as physical media goes, I have said it bfore and I'll say it again: The inevitable demise of the compact disc has been happening for over twenty years now!