Since the Filipino Viva titles are on Sale, I finally decided to buy a Pinoy DVD to add to my humble collection.
Soon as I saw
Pangako...Ikaw Lang, I wanted to buy it since it a relatively new movie and the disc have features. But wifey isn't interested.
She'd rather watch the comedy
Pusong Mamon she said. I checked the back cover for features and noticed they put a sticker to cover the features listed there. We asked the
Video City people why is it so, and told us it was a misprint in the label. So despite that this title has NO feature (not even the FREEVIEW!) we decided to buy. The sales attendant (friendly & courteous) told us that we can view a sample first to see the quality so we did.
Here's what we saw: the MENU contains (1)Chapter Selection (2)Subtitle and (3)Play Movie. The menu layout is simple (bordering on boring) while the chapter selections has moving video clips. Upon seeing the Studio ID, we could see the scratches. Not a good sign. Opening title, scene with babies/toddlers, and we can still see some scratches. We went on to the actual movie and noticed that the color is too dull to be on DVD. The first scene is daytime and outdoors and it looks gloomy and dusky. Compare HBO against CinemaOne for an actual sample. Obviously, the film wasn't remastered for the DVD release. To think that we were viewing it on a small hangging monitor on the shop.
So are tagalog dvd's worth buying? All I can say is at Php450, we still didn't buy.
Hope the recent releses (those with the VIVA 20th
logo) are better.