So that was a huge pain, because £19.99 for a Blu-ray was quite steep. It would be awhile before multi-region Blu-rays became common, as studios realised what consumers had started doing with DVD imports and didn’t want history repeating itself so quickly. This was partly because Blu-rays was more expensive to collect, but mostly because I couldn’t import cheaper ‘Region A’ discs to work on my ‘Region B’ Playstation 3. However, my enthusiasm for collecting started to dim in my late-20s. Suddenly, my beloved DVDs seemed almost as antiquated as VHS tapes!
I then transitioned to getting Blu-rays (accepting the fact they were often £4–10 more expensive than DVDs had since become), and enjoyed seeing movies in even more astonishing detail.
MOVIE COLLECTOR PRO 16 UPGRADE
This is when Blu-ray was launched, and at first it wasn’t too much of a hardship to buy a Playstation 3 (which could play Blu-ray discs) and upgrade to a ‘HD-Ready’ television.
MOVIE COLLECTOR PRO 16 MOVIE
I remember Superman: The Movie and thinking it was a revelation on DVD.Īn eclectic mix of the great and grotesque in early-’00s DVD.
Quite often you’d watch “old movies” because it felt like everything has been given a facelifts, because everyone was used to watching non-widescreen VHS tapes. I think people nowadays forger that a big reason DVD was so successful is it was offering a multitude of advantages over the previous way to watch films at home. Consequently, maybe about 20% of my collection is comprised of “bad movies” like Evan Almighty, Elektra, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and suchlike. There was no guiding principle behind what I bought, either - I’d just noticed something interesting while browsing the website and impulse buy it. I even branched out to the Asian market for J-Horror and the odd Korean action movie. So for about 7 years, I amassed a decent collection of DVDs that were mostly imports. So I would buy batches of foreign DVDs each month, often of things that hadn’t even been released in UK cinemas yet, or just choose to acquire better editions of Region 2 discs - as it was common for North American versions to have a lot more special features and extras. I don’t remember what the exchange rate was back then, but there was a British website that imported Region 1 DVDs from the US and Canada (via the island of Jersey), and I remember it being very much worth my time financially. I upgraded to a multi-region DVD player in 2001, and that’s when literally a world of entertainment opened up to me. But once DVD was released, I was an early adopter and passionate advocate. Well, beyond getting every Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on tape to stay ahead of friends watching the show on Sky TV. Before DVD, I wasn’t a big collector of VHS tapes.
And while that sounds a bit laughable almost 20 years later, at the time it was home theatre nirvana watching “crystal clear” movies with sound effects coming from behind you.
MOVIE COLLECTOR PRO 16 TV
Okay? My devotion to the digital format was born that year (cemented by the release of The Matrix), and DVD soon inspired me to use my earnings to buy a 32" widescreen TV and a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound system. Don’t hold that against me, because I was just looking for movies that would look particularly impressive on my whopping 28" CRT television. I bought my first DVD player in 1999, launching my collection with stone cold classics like Armageddon… uh, Godzilla (1998)… and, um, The Faculty. I was a voracious collector of DVDs in my twenties.
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