I saw this series decades ago and loved it. I want to buy it on DVD, but I am reluctant to spend that much money without knowing the recording quality and whether or not the screens is mared by logos. Does anyone know anything good or bad about any particular releases?
shareI checked it out of the library, and the overall quality makes it worth owning.
Fast/Cheap/Good: Pick Two.
I own the BBC Warner DVD box set in NTSC (with the brown band across the top of the cover), the one that's sold standard at Amazon.com, etc. The quality is basically perfect.
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What a loss. His like shall not pass this way again.
shareFor the record, the Blu-ray release is excellent too. The series was shot on film so it has revealed plenty of extra detail, just as you'd expect from a cinema feature from the same era. The cityscapes and - of course - the art benefits immensely from the HD presentation. Obviously you mustn't expect quite the same clarity you'd see in a modern digital production, but it's certainly a marked improvement on standard-definition DVD.
Unlike the Blu-ray of "The World at War" they've resisted all temptation to crop and re-frame this series into the 16:9 aspect ratio of modern televisions, a screen format the programme was never intended for. Thankfully, it remains in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1. There are no on-screen logos, no compression issues (the 13 episodes are spread comfortably across 4 discs), and even the audio is uncompressed LPCM 2.0 (dual mono).
American viewers should be wary of the UK Blu-ray, though, as it is encoded in 1080i/50, preserving the 25 frames-per-second playback rate of the original UK TV broadcast. It's a playback rate that isn't used in America, so most of your Blu-ray players and HDTVs can't recognise or handle it. Be sure to double-check that your equipment can handle 1080i/50 video material before importing.