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EndorForest Review

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I recently received the Endorforest bootleg of the definitive collection LD's. I thought I would let everyone know what my personal opinion is of the quality of these DVD's.

Firstly the physical look of the package is very good, original poster work on the cases and the disks themselves, with a nice insert giving brief film production notes and chapter stop titles.

Star Wars; The main movie starts off looking a little soft to my eyes but seems to improve over the course of the film, colours are beautifully rendered and make my old Asian silver set look washed out. Their are a few motion glitches especially when things are moving across screen on the horizontal plane, the objects seem to judder a little like dropped frames or something similar. This could be an encoding problem as I doubt it is on the original LD's. Also anything that is at, or close to the red end of the spectrum looks a little pixellated. Sound is simple dolby 2.0, I tried the 5.1 setting but it sounded exactly the same to me. It sounds very clear though and I can hear things in the sound stage that simply weren't there in the old asian silver set. Overall a good disk with plenty of bonus material. The bit rate tends to peak at about 6Mb and averages around 4.5 as it does on all the other disks in this set.

The Empire Strikes Back; This is probably the most consistantly good of the three disks, again beautifully rendered colours but a problem with reddish hues as on the star wars disk, it has a sharper picture than Star Wars. I noticed the layer change on this disk at about 115 mins right in the middle of a scene, pretty poor planning there. Dagobah looks particulary clear and colourful. The motion artefacts I mentioned above are on this disk as well but aren't too much of a problem. Sound again is Dolby 2.0 but has a nice and detailed sound stage.

Return of the Jedi; This is where this package really drops a major bollock. This disk renders a very competent package to below average in one felled swoop. It starts off well enough with a picture and sound that betters either of the other disks. About halfway through the movie, when the team are on Endor, the picture seems to break up into what can best be described as a venetian blind effect. It's like 2 out of three scan lines are missing and the edges of everything look like zoomed in bitmaps without antialiasing enabled, sort of like a saw blade effect. This is really obvious on my 40" rear projection tv, perhaps prog scan might resolve this. The picture remains like that for the rest of the movie.

It's a pity about this third disk because up until then this was the nearest thing we had to an official release of the OOT. So there you have it. I will probably end up selling this package as it isn't good enough to sit in my collection unless whoever manufactured it brings out a revised edition of Jedi to correct the glitches on that disk.

If you hardly watch Jedi then this collection is worth buying as it is pretty cheap. But if you want the whole package then look somewhere else. I'm going to email these comments to Endorforest as well as they said they would appreciate feedback.

Cheers.
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Just more asian garbage-these people do not care about quality. They are solely interested in making money. It's truly pathetic when a team of pirates can't do nearly as good of a job as one college student with less sophisticated equipment can (creator of my set).
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Originally posted by: eros
It's a pity about this third disk because up until then this was the nearest thing we had to an official release of the OOT.

What makes this particular set the nearest thing to an official release?

Here's something weird. I did a search on Google the other day and endorforest.com came up as a sponsered link. How can they get away with that?

Greedo shoots first? Not in my DVD player.
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Originally posted by: TR47
Just more asian garbage-these people do not care about quality. They are solely interested in making money. It's truly pathetic when a team of pirates can't do nearly as good of a job as one college student with less sophisticated equipment can (creator of my set).


Yes, but seeing as you replied to a post a while back that you don't ship to UK I haven't got the choice!

q]Originally posted by: Obi-Wan Spicoli

What makes this particular set the nearest thing to an official release?


I meant that it is factory pressed rather than DVDr.
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It looks like this is the VERY same set that is on the www.prillaman.net website

This is an ASIAN created DVD silvers or Durian's (real pressed DVD's) bootleg set not created by TR47

Check out this site to find out more about DVD Silver's/Durian's.


I have about 3 links to different sites that sell this set.

THEY do come with cover art and cases - all cost $32.88 - It seems that there is ONE source but MANY re-sellers

I hope this helps everybody!

WORD -
RiK

“My skill are no longer as Mad as the once were” RiK