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Posted by Temsonic on 05/28/64 11:38
"Mik F" <mik.foggin@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1138357931.177107.301080@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Folks,
>
> As a long time lurker (few lunchtimes are complete without a quick
> visit to u.m.d and u.m.h-c,) I've noticed that there's a huge drop-off
> in requests for region comparisons.
>
> I was curious as to whether this was down to people googling for the
> results or whether it was more to do with the studios 'wising up' and
> releasing virtually identical discs worldwide in order to 'protect
> their territorial markets' hem hem.
>
> At the risk of reopening a can of worms, if price were the only real
> differential between US R1 and UK R2 on any given disc, would you be
> prepared to wait a week extra for delivery in order to save a quid or
> two?
>
> This is essentially the situation I'm facing with regard to a few films
> and TV series I've been meaning to get for a while now, and the only
> thing that keeps nagging at me is the old issue of NTSC vs PAL.
>
> Putting aside the 'PAL speedup' and 'NTSC pulldown' arguments, I think
> it's true to say that regardless of this NTSC and PAL differ in the
> number of scan lines available in the vertical axis of the screen; NTSC
> has 480, PAL has 576.
>
> This would seem to suggest that PAL has more information / detail in a
> 'screen' than the equivalent NTSC frame, or is this just true for
> broadcast images?
>
> If the R2 PAL film has better resolution in this respect it would seem
> to be a better bet but I suppose this might also be affected by the
> overall compression / bit rate of the disc itself.
>
> Thoughts and opinions?
>
> Mik
After the initial novelty of extras wore off a few years ago, I now often
just go for the best release of the _film_ for my needs and treat the bonus
material as just that - a bonus. For example, I buy a lot of world cinema
stuff 'blind' just because I like the sound of them from reviews. In these
cases I often go for R3 releases because they're cheap and tend to feature
DTS, though they often have no extras. This way I don't feel I've blown too
much money if the film turns out to be so-so.
For films where I actually am interested in the extra material, it'll depend
on balancing up price, possible cuts, what the extras actually are, whether
the release is anamorphic, has 5.1 sound, DTS etc. The Rewind website is
invaluable for checking on this stuff and can save quite a bit of Googling:
http://www.dvdcompare.net
As to NTSC vs. PAL, I still prefer PAL mainly because 3:2 pulldown annoys me
more than PAL speedup. Though technically there _is_ more information and
detail in a PAL picture, I find a decent anamorphic NTSC DVD looks as good
as PAL one. It's only on non-anamorphic NTSC when you begin to see the scan
lines that it really starts to look ropey. Mainly though it comes down to
price - if there's a decent presentation of the film with no extras
available for 7 vs. an edition with extras for 15, I'll go for the 7 one
regardless of what region/standard it is.
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