I Will Never Buy Another Dvd Set From Universal (1 Viewer)

[Jeff#]

I have over 300 DVDs in my collection -- TV series (mostly) and feature films. The only defective discs I've encountered include literally the last few seconds of THE PRISONER episode "It's Your Funeral" when the helicopter flies away, and 2 episodes of WISEGUY on the "Between the Mob and a Hard Place" set. And those were both audio and video-related issues. Studioworks replaced those 2 discs free of charge, and the replacements work perfectly.

By the way, for those of us a bit less technically-oriented, what is a Disc 18 disc?

 

[RickER]

Jeff#, DVD-18 is a 2 sided and 2 layer DVD. That would be 2 layers for each side, and a lot of glue to hold all those layers together. They didn't make many DVD-18s at first because of how hard and expensive they were to make. It would seem with my experience with DVD-18s that they are cheap to make now, but still have a nasty failure rate, IMO.

 

[Stephane]

I ran my Buck Rogers through the entire series. My set did not have any scratches. My Sont DVPNS 9000 ran through them all without a hitch. I do not own any of the other box sets that you mentioned.

 

[RickER]

My Buck Rogers hangs up on one of the Gary Coleman episodes, but seeing as it is a Gary Coleman episode Universal did me a favor. I wont have to watch it again.

 

[Andrew Bunk]

Well I got my BSG Season One set and as stated before it does contain single sided labeled discs. Woo hoo! Maybe Ron Moore stepped and told Universal not to f this one up.

Also surprised to see that they came in slim packs-that should make floaters less likely.

 

[John*D]

As stated before, UNI usually makes the first release of a series on DVD-9's.. Then they go to DVD-18's for subsequent releases!

 

[Andrew Bunk]

I don't recall seeing that mentioned in this thread. Maybe I missed it. From what I remember the original BSG and Buck Rogers were both DVD-18 to start. There may be others that do switch over, but these are the only ones I had personal experience with. I wound up selling both off but had no known issues.

Wouldn't switching from DVD-9's to DVD-18's call for slimmer packaging since there would be less discs? Seems like a pointless change.

 

[ElijahS]

The titles that have "switched over" switched to go along with the rest of Universal's titles, and those were the older Universal titles, like Law & Order (mothership/SVU/CI): The First Year. Only Monk hasn't switched to double-sided discs as far as I know.

 

[Andrew Bunk]

Thanks for that info Elijah. I don't watch L&O, and the Monk sets I've seen where single sided.

 

[Jeff#]

MacGyver (from Paramount) switched from single-sided to double-sided with the 2nd season. The 3rd season just came out.

I haven't purchased any of these collections yet. Are they all in excellent shape as I expect they would be?

 

[MattHR]

I believe the discs are still single-sided. Paramount just started using the double-ThinPak disc cases to hold two discs, which cuts the package size in half.

 

[John*D]

Correct, double thinpaks, not double-sided discs. They also appear to have done the same with Charmed Season 2.

 

[AnthonyC]

Yep, Paramount has never used double-sided discs to my knowledge.

 

[Dave Mack]

Hooray for Paramount! What I don't get with Universal is if it IS a cost saving measure to use less discs it's silly as it has been shown that people will pay ALOT of dough for shows they really want. Look how much The Star Trek and X-Files sets sold for! So give us more discs, do it the best possible way quality-wise and charge a bit more for it. I would have paid MUCH more than $18.99 for the first Abbott and Costello set. As it was, my set was defective but I didn't realize it til' it was too late to return it to the store as their 14 day window had expired. And guess what? Even at the very reasonable price asked, I have not bought another volume. I would have though if they had been done right...

 

[Christian L.]

Aside from the fact that Universal doesn´t really seem to care about collectors, an example is their horrible Airwolf S1 box were they misprinted the backcover with the crew from S4, i haven´t got problems with their DVD-18 discs, yet.

I hope the current situation with a lot of defective discs is not an indication of future boxsets.

I´m also with Dave Mack on this, i would rather pay $5 more than having faulty discs, cause replacing can be a nightmare if those defects are only starting to occur months later.

I´m desperately waiting for "The Six Million Dollar Man " and also "Bionic Woman". If they mess those sets up i will be majorly disappointed. I hope they know how fans feel for this series.

 

[Jeff#]

Oh, so MacGyver's next 2 seasons are also single-sided? Like I said, I haven't purchased any of those yet.

To ask the question again (but differently): Are the film print transfers in excellent condition, as they always were in TV airings?

 

[Katherine_K]

One thing to remember is that X-Files and Star Trek are almost NEVER good comparisons for sales of anything but themselves.

 

[Matt Stone]

Layers aren't glued together. In fact, I'm not even sure a 2-sided DVD has any glue. Laserdiscs did, but I honestly don't know about DVDs.

 

[Scott-S]

I also have stopped buying any Dual Layer / Double Sided DVDs. This means that I won't be purchasing any TV on DVD from universal. This is sad, because there are a lot of titles I would buy. I signed up with netflix so that I can still watch these dvds, but on a single sided disc.

It is a shame that the studios don't listen. :frowning:

 

[Christian L.]

Not exactly the layers, but the layers themselves are glued to the silicon itself with a special adhesive. A DVD-18 (needs special replication lines, not all lines provide this) is nothing else than 2x DVD-9 glued together (another layer of adhesive), however they are also a lot thinner than 2x DVD-9 discs to still meet DVD standards. If you look at the surface of some defective discs (which are not scratched) you get the impression of a milky substance which actually happens to be the adhesive between both layers.

The defect rate is a LOT higher (even by todays standards) because the adhesive plays a critical role in bonding the discs. If certain quality standards of those replication lines are not met than you get a lot of defective discs in the end, which is one of the reasons why some dvd producers still prefer DVD-9.