Wow, Married W/Children and Three's Company fans are going to be

[Deja Q]

disappointed.

Especially for you HDTV fans.

I bought the Three's Company season 1 disc but had read the Married w/Children season 1 review.

Both discs suffer from having too many episodes squeezed onto too little disc space; resulting in picture quality problems.

Given the price of these discs, combined with the fact that "All in the Family" looks better and costs less per full season, distributors of TV shows on DVD are really doing things on the cheap yet charging as much as they can. :puke: A pity they won't treat their fans better.

[scottcsmith]

1. Maybe the prints were in bad shape?

How many eps are on the "Three's Company" DVD? Just six, right? Sounds like they were not digitally remastered...were they?

It's funny, some old movies look really good on DVD, while more recent movies look awful. "The Jerk" on DVD is just horrible.

[Deja Q]

2. DVD compression and artifacting, here's the scoop

The Three's Company episodes looked like they came from crisp masters. And the sound was perfect. But they look grainy and there's a definite formaton to the pattern, especially with background images... Click pause to look at a still frame and you'll instantly see the problem. (what I should do is put up a framegrab...) The fact that background objects are noticably worse off is a dead giveaway of excessive video compression.

The problem is caused by too much compression or a poor transfer from the original videotape to MPEG2 (the DVD video standard).

There are single layer discs (that hold 2 hours in best quality format or 6 hours in "crap quality" format that's semi-comparable to VHS, though worse because the DVD extended play compression isn't uniform, especially for background images, whereas VHS just looks like a uniform fuzzy image.)

There are dual layer discs (double the amount).

Now I've bought "I Spy" (the 1965 TV show) on DVD. 4 50-minute eps per disc. They are crisp and pure and delightful to watch even though the restoration work was limited to sound and color saturation (no work was done at all to remove dirt and scratches from the film prints themselves). 204 minutes in length.

Three's Company: 6 24 minute episodes on a disc. 144 minutes long. Grainy with artifacts, particularly in background objects, and is not as delightful to watch (though thanks to sharp writing, I'm concentrating more on the dialogue so it's not as much of a problem).

In the end, we do buy these for the content, but if they can make a movie from 1953 look spectacular, if they can make a 1968 videotaped TV show look great, they certainly can make 1977 and 1987 shows look even better. And you can tell from watching that the masters are in excellent condition. It's definitely a transfer or compression problem. :cry:

But given that 3C is $12.99 (or more), there's no excuse for the poor picture quality. I'd actually be better off capturing the episodes from cable into my computer and burning DVD discs.

I'm now wondering if I should even open up the other discs I bought (Brady Bunch Movie and Mars Attacks). DVD means higher quality and that's how it should be for ALL releases. It can be done so why are they doing it on the cheap? Did the MPAA raise its membership fees?!

[OneTwentyoNine]

3. Take em back....

Thanks for the warning,I wanted to buy the Married W/Children set. But..I'm not going to put up with crap quality--HELL,thats why you buy a DVD in the first place. If I want grain and crap image I'd buy it on VHS for much much less.

Take it back to Best Buy or wherever and send a message....

David

[Deja Q]

4. Can't, they won't return opened merchandise...

Despite copy protection because the reason these items can't be returned is because they think we've copied the item for ourselves. :eyes: See, we're all thieves to them and that's their way of ensuring we don't do wrong. Which is a pity because they've done wrong and are getting lots of $$$ from it. Who are the thieves again?

I intend to write to both companies who released these shows on DVD and complain big-time (though politely).

And, despite knowing about the no-return policy, I'm going to try returning it anyway. The more people who do might send a message (well, hopefully.)

Freakin' MPAA.

For 3C and MWC, download them from kazaa until the companies release proper quality editions at the same price. I normally don't recommend doing that stuff, but if the MPAA is going to treat customers this badly...