Excellent picture quality for 60 year old films
588129
One DVD freezes during the second episode on the very first disc.....otherwise this is one fantastic package at a good price
4136681
This was a great find.  Two for one at an unbelievable price. Just like a Saturday matinee in the 1950s.  The transfers are rich crisp and clear. Blacks are deep contrast is super.  Just as in anything the quality of your electronics and how it is calibrated can make a big difference.  There is some print damage and noticeable grain in some of the special effect scenes especially in it came from beneath the sea. But all in all a terrific fun time for less than $10.00.
4918405
I learned photography on the 35mm manual cameras of the 60s and 70s.  Using this lens brings back memories of that era with the added feature of much easier focusing with the Sony A6000.  I am satisfied with the clarity of this lens and the f1.7 speed is good.  I do shoot mostly in f2 to f4.  I believe this lens is an incredible value for an amateur like me.
2609843
Granted this great Samsung 52" is hooked up to a Sony 1080p player with all the right cables. But the output speaks for itself. It is NO exaggeration to say that DVD's take on an eerily three-dimensional quality. Not just the new BD's and SD DVD that are created with electronic wizardry, or the usual animated items. I'm talking "The Crimson Pirate" with Burt Lancaster, or even home-made DVD's off of TCM! Seeing Fred Astaire walk across the room of the Thacakry Club in "Top Hat" and you just KNOW which tables are behind and in front of him, in crystal clarity--off of a home-made standard DVD of a TCM broadcast! Worked immediately out of the box, easy set up, amazing construction quality. I'd recommend pairing this with a good quality upscaling DVD player--preferably Blue Ray--and HDMI cables that support a 120hz refresh rate. The result? Blacks that are absolutley black and colors that are eye popping. Plasma may end up going the way of VHS.

One last note. Notwithstanding the brilliance of the images, I'm beginning to suspect that we may hear or read some visual equivalent of the complaints we often hear about CD's sounding "metallic" or "artificial." In some respects, the images are almost TOO good, if one can imagine such a thing. This may particularly be the case with '40's films in black and white. An exmample: watching a standard DVD of "An American in Paris" with Gene Kelley, using a Sony BlueRay player with acknowledged fabulous upscaling capability. At times, certain scenes from this DVD--from 1953, I believe--looked amazingly as if it were videotape! I happened to enjoy the effect, but I can imagine that some purists might find this offputting. Hey. Nice to have such a problem, in many ways.
4305380
The picture quality on this TV is so good that regular DVDs played on my LG BluRay player look as clear a the BluRay disc looked on my old TV.
3917201
Works great, easy to install, picture quality is excellent
4502686
I've been reading about all the technical problems people have been posting. I got lucky and have had no problems at all yet. I've played 4 all the way through with no problems (Notorious, Lifeboat, Rebecca, and Spellbound), and quickly tested the others and no problems so far. (Toshiba HD-A20 player).

I'm very impressed with the picture quality on these 1920s to 40s movies. They've done a good job with restoration.

Lots of great features too. Each movie has a lengthy "making of" feature and other long features, plus interviews with Hitchcock and many other things. I wonder if they are using a newer type of compression to accomodate all these things, and that may account for a lot of the technical problems people are having  -- maybe older machines and some newer ones don't work well with this type of compression. Just speculating. It could be that it was just a particular batch that went bad. So some sets are good and some defective.

The main thing I don't like is the packaging -- it's just not very practical:

* The movies are each inserted into 8 different cardboard pages in a thick looseleaf booklet, with regular paper pages interspersed between. To get the movie you want you have to flip through the looseleaf book until you find it. There are no tabs, so until you memorize where in the book they all are, you have to do some searching.

* The cardboard pages that the movies slide into don't clearly label the name of the movie. You can see the top of half of the discs, but the titles are on the lower half of the discs, hidden in the slot, so you can't use the disc to identify the movie. You have to look in the small type amongst the credits typed onto the slot, to see the name of the movie, or else flip back to the beginning of the pages relating to the movie - it's labeled there. I'm tempted to write in the name of the movie in big letters at the top of the pages of the inserts, but that's bad news for later if one wants to sell it.

* There are at least 6 pages of info for each movie, but a lot of that is wasted space. There is no page detailing the cast for each movie. The best you get is the top 2 or 3 stars printed on the slot for the movie. You have to go to the credits of the movie itself to see who plays what. This is very inconvenient if you suddenly see an actor you want to identify. Fortunately I have IMDB handy for that on the web. I may copy out the cast for each of these movies from that and word process them all onto a single paper and stick that in the set. But it seems like MGM should have done that task for us. Among the 6 pages for each movie is one page that is just a few quotes from the movie and a few pictures. It would have been better to put the cast in those pages instead.

One might be better off buying each movie separately, but they are not all available that way, with all these special features. I'm convinced that the PQ and the substance of the movies are good enough that I am going to give the set a 5 and overlook the inconvenience of the packaging.
3979720
My 82 year old dad loooved it, good resolution for that time movies
2352340
I have this DVD player hooked up to my Sony 60" XBR display, so picture quality was very important to me.  I tried a number of players with high quality DVDs, and also with a couple of benchmarking discs that are designed to put the upconverting and various other features through rigorous tests.

This Oppo player had the best image out of all the players I tried.  It has many settings which can be used to tweak your picture, and I found that finding the best setting was important for getting the most out of the player (and was also somewhat time-consuming).

But the effort was worth it.  Great picture.

The only negative is that the player isn't as polished as it could be.  The remote control is awkward to use, the menus and screensaver look very amateurish, and the disc tray is a little flimsy and hard to get a disc into without scratching the disc.

This Genesis/Faroudja chip is also known for having a macroblocking enhancement (MBE) problem, which isn't Oppo's fault.  This means that the player sometimes enhances the rectangular blocks inherent in dark areas of compressed video.  These blocks are present on all DVDs, but this player can sometimes enhance them and make them look worse.  It depends on the display you are using.  Some TVs will show it worse than others.  It can be minimized with tweaking the brightness/contrast settings of both the player and the TV.
3276419
Excellent picture quality.  Great price for the quality of the product.  The speakers aren't great, but are adequate.  If you connect to external speakers, it will make all the difference with the sound quality.  I highly recommend.
1271169
This is old stuff but very well done. Some have grumbled about the transfer but considering the age of the material I thought it pretty good and there are excellent subtitles for the hearing impaired. The films are excellent and are classics. At a discount this is well worth buying.
3121867
the films in this set have super picture quality good sound and offer great value you cannot beat this set from timeless
1004605
Great picture quality considering the original movie is an old one. Needless to say, many people like the story too!
3949090
Excellent quality footage from the 70s and 80s.
Even the short extras from an old concert has an image quality which is better than some Blurays from our days
3662486
This "Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella" is my favorite version of this classic story. I viewed it several times on TV since it first aired in 1965.  I won't go into how great it is, as others have covered that well.

What I will focus on is the amazing picture quality of this 50th Anniversary DVD, and its improved sound, both vs. the 13-years-older previous DVD release.  That older one had truly excellent video quality on my old, but excellent, standard-definition 32" tube TV.  When viewing it on my 55" High-Definition TV, that older DVD version is quite soft as to focus.  Disappointing, but totally expected.  A 1965 TV special shot in video IS NOT SUPPOSED to look excellent on a 2013 hi-def TV.  It was not created for high definition, a technology that was decades away.  It WAS sharp as heck in 1965 on the tube TVs of the day, however.

Well, I purchased the new 50th Anniversary version, which is approximately 13 years newer than the prior DVD version, after reading two fairly technical reviews on another website about why this newer edition looked and sounded better due to its remastering.  That piqued my interest in seeing the newer version, though I had always been happy with the old one (though never had watched the old one on my new High-Definition TV set).

Right after viewing my older DVD version, I viewed the new 50th Anniversary edition (remastered and issued by Shout! Factory, who had butchered some releases I had liked, notably Season 7 of the TV show, "All In The Family"-- just ruining that), but I was overwhelmed by the improvement on BOTH TV's!  On the SD (older) TV, this newer "Cinderella" DVD is sharper (I hadn't thought that would even be possible on the older set), and the colors were more vivid; it just looked distinctly NEWER and better.  And on my new HD TV, it is phenomenally better than the older DVD, and is pretty darned sharp still, CLOSE TO a hi-def look, despite being video (not film) and from 1965, also not being a blu-ray.  It is EXCELLENT, even on a hi-def TV.  The sound, which had seemed fine on the older DVD, is also louder and clearer on both TVs.  (By the way, it basically never makes sense to issue blu-rays for broadcasts shot in video, as this was, as older video, despite its sharpness on old TVs, simply doesn't pack the pixels per square inch to upgrade onto blu-ray.  This is why you basically NEVER see a video broadcast from years ago (such as a soap opera, any live US sports broadcast, or "All In The Family" episodes, to cite some examples of video) upgraded from DVD to blu-ray-- the source stock is just not strong enough.)

A wonderful and highly unusual feature of this newer DVD version is that the short featurette on the making of this TV special, shot in 2001, is ALSO upgraded in picture/sound quality for the newer, 50th Anniversary DVD-- this is VERY rare!  Not even done on blu-rays!  Though, as often happens with Shout! Factory releases, the closing credits, as they run, are vibrating and distorted.  Yikes.  The featurette is VERY interesting, with Lesley Ann Warren, Stuart Damon, and Celeste Holm onscreen and speaking repeatedly in it (in 2001 interviews done for this featurette).

They actually reduced the special features on the newer release, notably a selected filmography of the principal actors on the older DVD was excluded from the newer one. Also, some movie trailers were excluded this time.  Lastly, the newer DVD has only a few words representing each chapter on the menu for jumping to a scene, whereas the older DVD has scene names PLUS a thumbnail picture from each scene.

The newer DVD also offers you the choice of the longer overture opening, or not.

I highly recommend upgrading to this new 50th Anniversary edition!  For me, it was only $9.95.  No need to keep the old one for any reason.
4689291
Before I went overseas I bought a Sharp color TV. This was 1970. The thing still works today. Its in the attic, but I plugged it last year and the picture is still good. The SHARP Tv I bought my daughter for her room when she was in high school is in use by her daughter.
You can't break a SHARP TV. so I had no problem getting ine of these guys for my bedroom.
The picture is astounding especially with a DVD. The X Flat screen has almost a 3d quality to the picture. Looking at Finding Nemo on it every who saw it was amazed at the quality.
I love the V-compression feature. It uses some koind of magic to use the full resolution of the screen for widescreen discs. Basically a TV ser has so many lines of resolution. When a widescreen picture utilizes only 2/3 of the available lines the picture quality will suffer. This set gets around that.
My only complaint is that it harder to get the captions on this set as say a Sony. A Sony required just a single button on the remote for DISPLAY. With the SHARP unit you have to manuever through a menu to turn the captions on and off.
Other than that this is a wonderful set and prices right for a 36" flat screen with this quality and these features.
4884285
This 42" Panasonic plasma features a picture quality far superior to any other flat panel display in the 40-42 inch size range currently on the market. Featuring 1080P resolution and deep black levels that only plasma can provide, the TH-42PZ700U  is equally at home watching HD and SD programming, playing games on next generation consoles (Xbox 360, PS3) or watching DVDs (Blu-Ray or HD-DVD highly recommended). Coupled with a quality high definition signal, the picture quality is nothing short of stunning. A sleek stylish case rounds out this very complete package. The only weak spot in the Panasonic's game is the decidedly dated and unattractive remote. Though completely functional, the remote looks like an eyesore on this reviewer's coffee table.