Good but how good?
I hope I'm editing my original review, but if not, this review supersedes my original. I bought this Harry Potter Blu-Ray video set because it would have cost more to complete our DVD collection of Harry Potter videos by purchasing what we needed separately. These are the only Blu-ray videos we have so I can only compare them to DVD discs. While playing on our Blu-ray player and comparing it to a standard Harry Potter DVD I really don't see any difference in picture quality, but this could be due to them only being 480i discs. Although the Harry Potter DVD is also a 480i, I would have thought a Blu-ray disc on a Blu-ray player would have a better picture than a DVD on a Bu-ray player. There are numerous things I noticed with these Blu-ray discs, but I'll try to be as short as possible. Discs 1-6 have no menu for play, scene selection, extras, etc, so they all start automatically, which is not a big deal. They will all also restart where you left off if you stop, not just pause, the movie even if the player is turned off as long as the disc is not ejected. That is the same with every DVD I have ever watched in the past. While discs 6-8 have a menu, they all take quite a while to load it. All three of the discs will restart the movie from the beginning if you stop, again, not pause, but stop the movie for any reason. These discs do not allow you to restart the movie where you left off unless you remember where you were and return to that point using the scene selection in the menu. This is inconvenient if someone is watching the movie and need to stop and won't be restarting it for a while or don't want to pause it. I also noticed on parts 1 and 2 of The Deathly Hallows that there was some issues with the picture quality. I didn't notice it on the other six, but I've only watched them through once and the last two were watched two weeks after the first six so they aren't as fresh in my memory. The issue was in a few scenes where Harry, Ron, and Hermione were talking while standing still and Harry's hair was waving like the the tide of an ocean rolling in to shore. I'm also disappointed with the picture size. Although these videos are formatted for widescreen TVs, they do not fill the screen on my TV. The picture in normal mode measures 27.5" x 16", so there are black bars around all four sides of the picture. The DVD I compare them to was formatted for full-screen TVs, (4:3 ratio), but that video covered all of the screen from the top to bottom on my TV. I can change the view size on my TV, but setting it to wide or panoramic stretched the video excessively from side to side distorting the picture. While setting it to zoom fills the whole screen and keeps the proportions correct, you lose some of the picture around all four sides. So we have to watch a video that is only slightly wider than the screen on our old full-screen TV which was 22" x16.5" on a 43" widescreen TV. I'm not really happy with these videos.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
