DVD Buying Habits

[George Bellefontaine]

When DVD first came out I bought everything in sight and not long ago I cleared out a lot of titles I had only watched once. There was a lot of crap there. But now that rentals are everywhere, I am much more choosey in what titles I buy. I am still replacing some VSH tapes with titles such as Gunfight At The OK Corral, Nevada Smith, The Carpet Beggars, etc., and there are some current movie releases that look forward to owning, but as I said, I am much more choosey. How about you ?




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[Robbie]

I always have been choosey of what I bought. buying only the classics or those I really enjoyed before. That being said I am always a sucker for a cheap movie impulse buy. :roll: I really need to go through my titles and remove the ones I really don't have any desire to see again.

Robbie

[Burke Strickland]

George -- Like you, in the beginning I bought "almost everything out there" that I felt I'd have an even remote interest in seeing more than once and that was for several reasons:

1) there wasn't all that much "out there" so to have any DVDs to watch at all made it necessary to have fairly loose selection criteria
2) for those titles I really did have a alot of interest in, I wanted to make sure I had the movies I wanted in hand, in case they went out of print the way many laser discs had before I got around to buying quite a few specific titles of interest
3) I wanted to help promote DVD as a viable product so more titles would become available.
4) I got snookered by a lot of special "deals" that turned out to be higher prices than the same titles would LIST for just a few months later. This only concerns me about titles I bought primarily to have a "complete" collection even if I wasn't all that wild about the film. (Some of those I've never gotten through even once, and so weren't really a good buy at any price.) The movies I really wanted to see right away and that I've watched multiple times and plan to see even more times in the future, I feel that having gotten them early on rather than waiting to see if the price would drop was still a valid purchase decision (and still is for new titles).

Frankly some of the early releases were so ineptly produced (for example, The Last Emperor and Ouitland had more edge enhancement artifacts or poor resoulutuion due ot lack of "anamorphic" remastering of letter boxed wide screen material than the corresponding laser discs) that all the claims about DVD picture "quality" were given the lie. So it was a wonder that we persevered and kept buying until the studios started producing such consistently good looking and sounding DVDs that some reviewers who made their mark early on with reliable critiques of the picture and sound quality of the DVDs havbe given it up since they've run out of adjectives that all say the same thing. :>)

Of course, some of the early releases were truly fabulous and hold up pretty well today against the best that have been produced since. Even if slight improvements have been eked out in "Super Bit"-type re-releases of such titles as The Fifth Element or Amadeus, these and other best examples of the early releases looked and sounded superb in their original releases and helped define how good DVDs could be.

With over 700 titles in my collection, you'd thing I'd have a lot of DVDs to cull out. Actually, when I was looking through the list for a couple of titles to trade for LOTR: FOTR last summer, I had a hard time coming up with even 10 titles that I'd gladly part with (always thinking SOMEONE might request a viewing of a marginal one and keeping one I already bought is still cheaper than renting it later) -- I ended up trading out two that had originally been released non-anamorphic which had subsequently had the full Criterion treatment which I had also bought. (The Rock and Spartacus).

These days I am buying very few DVDs for a number of reasons -- I have already amassed a pile of DVDs that pretty well satisfies my urge to "collect", and I still have about 400 titles on laser disc that have not yet been duplicated on DVD, so I'm not even all that anxious about "classics" like the real Star Wars or the Indiana Jones movies. (In fact, after stating for a long time that I was really looking forward to Back to the Future on DVD, I'm letting my laser discs of that trilogy "handle it" for now.) And having invested in all those, there are a few other things here and there that I'd also like to spend my money on from time to time. :>)

Virtually all of the very few DVDs I have purchased over the past year and a half have been of new movies I have seen in the commercial theater during that time and really liked; the rest are of TV shows I especially enjoyed in years past which are now available on DVD in "complete season" box sets.

Burke

[George Bellefontaine]

Burke-- I agree, in the early days there were some pretty shoddy transfers. I recall one being Twister. I didn't buy it but did buy a later release with DD 5.1 and DTS, plus it had a much better transfer. Like you, though, I did see many early releases ( like Amadeus and the superb Fifth Element) that kept me going knowing that the format had a lot to offer. I also have quite a few laser discs, and though I replaced many in the past, I am less inclined to do so these days, The Indy set may be the exception.




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[Danbry39]

Am I going to be kicked off the forum if I admit I didn't get my first DVD player until November of 2001? Anyway, since then, I've bought over 200 DVD's and three more players.

The reason I bought so many right off the bat was to build a library of films that (1) meant a lot to me personally and (2) I would have a hard time finding at Hollywood or Blockbuster.

Since then, I buy maybe a couple a month and at least half of these are ones that I feel my wife or kids will like a lot. If they like something, it will be watched over and over and, in the end, save us a lot of money by owning the thing. The ones I buy for myself are ones that I'll probably watch again a year or two off, or ones that I can take the time to view the extras, etc. at my leisure.

It seems that I personally buy more CD's and DVDA's right now as I can listen to a piece of music many more times than I can watch a movie.




Keith

[David Meek]

I started buying back when DVD's first came out. I got LOT'S of good deals early on with the offers from the manufacturers, so my first hundred or so happened basically overnight. I've always been a little choosy on my purchases, just because there are a lot of stinker movies (and DVD's) out there. My purchases of DVD's have been fairly steady since that first buying orgy, but in the last month (and with the Orcas Island house), that's seen a major decline in that I've limited myself to "must haves" for now. With HD-DVD looming on the horizon, it has also helped me to limit things. Why keep buying when I may well replace many existing DVD's with HD-level ones?




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[George Bellefontaine]

Hey, Keith, you may have been late in starting, but with 200 titles you are catching up fast.




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[John Holmes]

Well I wasn't late to the party! :LOL: I recall being so upset that my receiver had DTS and there was no DTS dvd's for it. I went to CC and told them, I needed to borrow their DTS Laserdisc copy of Toy Stoy, so I can test the DTS decoding of my two month old (at that time) Sony rcvr. Since I was a frequent customer (in those days) and I purchased the unit from them, there was no issue with them lending it to me. Then, I ran to purchase "Water World" in DTS when it was finally released on dvd. I remember being so thrilled watching the DTS intro (which was much cooler then) and the movie that my wife said, "You need to find some more, I'm a little sick of seeing this one!". :idea: That was my ok to purchase.

From that period, like many of you. I would even purchase movies/disc that were marginal because, there was such a lack of titles to choose from. Not to mention, very few places (brick & mortor) for the first yr and half of dvd's being on the market, knew what the hell I was talking about when asked. The confused look became so funny, even my wife began to laugh when a salesperson would do it (Heck...even she knew what DVD was!). 8)

I have also like many of you, slowed down considerably on purchasing. It has to be something I truly want to see mutiple times. Renting has now become my big thing. At what it cost to rent from online retailers and the ease of the service, buying has become less attractive to me. And owning a laserdisc player makes needing the classics almost a non issue.




"I came here, to chew bubble gum and kickass. And I'm all out of bubble gum!!!" My DVD's

[P-Dub]

Yup, I gotta agree with most on this thread. I got my player and sound system back in 1999. At the moment I'm sitting at around the 300 mark in titles.

It seemed like any title that got labeled as reference, I had to have. Now I am very picky. We need to be able to watch a disc mutiple times before we buy. Recently we've been purchasing previously viewd DVD's from our rental place. That is probably the best deal in town.




Paul

There are three kinds of people in this world; those that can count, and those that can't.

[justin]

I buy about one or two a week. I'll say I been at a slow speed buying them because I don't want to end up with ones I'm not going to watch later. Now I've been buying previously owned movies and some of them have never been opened.

jus




Jus

Taking it one day at a time. Life moves quick.

[Dean McManis]

Yeah, in the early days whenever I had a laserdisc of a movie that was coming out on DVD, I'd sell the LD and buy the DVD version.

Of course at that time the LDs had some value, and at the same time there were great promotional coupon deals with the DVDs. So often I was able to upgrade to DVD without any money out-of-pocket.

And many of the DVDs (though not all) were new digital transfers, which looked decidedly better than the LDs that they replaced.

But like all of the other early adopters here, I did buy some marginal movies because there was such a limited selection of titles available on DVD in the beginning.

More than half of my current DVD collection (850+ DVDs) were acquired in the frenzy of the first 3 years.

But my DVD purchases have slowed considerably over the last year or so.
I now rent 3-4 DVDs a week, but I only average 1-2 new DVD purchase a week, often with a several week gap in purchases when there's nothing that I like coming out.

I've ended up buying about a dozen movies that I rented first and liked, and I've got a stash of around 30 DVDs in my Dupes-and-Duds drawer.
Plus with all of the DVDs that I rent, there still are about 20 or so movies in my collection that I've never watched so far. ops:

And with such a variety of my favorite DVDs always available at home to watch, plus all of the newly released DVDs available through rentals, buying DVDs is now only likely if it's one of my favorite movies, and I pretty much know that I'm going to be watching it more than just once.

-Dean.

[JonMarsh]

Like many, I've become more selective about my movie purchases; I only have a moderate size collection, ~ 350 disks, but I'm still adding. A lot more rentals in than in the past, but this reflects availablity of a variety of rentals. I can recall when my collection was bigger than Blockbuster's DVD selection...

Where I have been purchasing more is in TV series releases. I dont' have cable, dont' have time to watch things at their convenience, but I do enjoy having 1 hour blocks of entertainment, so season releases of shows like Buffy, Angel, Farscape, Andromeda, Sex in the City, X Files and others have become the new "staple" of my DVD buying habits- both my daughter and I enjoy watching "TV" at our convenience, and with better quality than you can get over the air... pretty weired, I guess, but that's life!

Hi, my name is Jon, and I have a SiFi trash TV problem.... (there are 20 step programs for this, aren't there? :LOL:




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