dvd picture quality

[robert]

I don't have a DVD home player but watch DVD's through my computer and am wondering if anyone knows why a few of the DVD's have such poor lighting.I mean some of them are perfect to watch but others seem very dark even with the monitor brightness turned up to max.

[richard]

It could be that they have been copied (poorly) from a vhs video?
Dont know for sure though.

[Dr No]

Could be all sorts of reasons - poorly encoded mpeg, copied from an analogue source. Could be your moniter's gamma. Computor moniters have a higher contrast ratio that TV moniters and to make matters worse PC moniters are slightly darker and less colourful than Apple monitors.

Solutions? Don't buy 'cheap' DVD's from moody traders and invest in some state of the art viewing tackle.

Dr No - he's got the perscription for your porn watching problems.

[Bill Malone]

To Robert - which title was it? Although you may forfeit more lurid subject matter, if you buy from better known companies (Ben Dover, Private, etc) you're sure to get a better DVD picture. It could be the camera work / lighting that was off.

To Dr No - did you know in the 007 novel, Dr. Julius No had pincers for hands and he glided along like a slug? At the end, he was buried under a ton of resently mined bird guano. I'm right popular at parties, me.

[Dr No]

It's been quite a while since I read Ian Flemming and I'm afraid that the lurid details of Julius No's demise had receded in my memory a little. But pincers or not. Dr No was one cool dude.

Dr No - Cloned.

[robert]

The problem ones are a few I've bought from USA/Canada but maybe the first reply was the answer because they are films that were released on video before DVD was invented and they have maybe not transferred to the new format very well.
I'll stick to newer films in future.
Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

[alec]

Older films are OK if they were converted from film rather than videotape. Some of the best DVD picture quality I've seen has been on older films. It's also partly to do with the care taken in conversion, which you can partly judge by the price you are paying. If it's an American site and the price is les than $10 assume the worst, regardless of age of film. If it's an old film, e.g. a late 70s or early 80s classic and the label is VCA or NuTEch in the USA (price $20 or more) or Blue One in France, for example, the quality is likely to suffer only if the original celluloid has flaws - the sort of thing you used to see on the cinema screen will also be visible on the DVD, but ignoring that the picture quality may well be superb. Some very recent productions have been converted to DVD very badly, e.g. Every Porn Fan's Ultimate Fantasy 8, which should be post-digital camera. I also get the feeling that some studios weren't very good with the colour balance in their first efforts - picture often too red, and also sometimes got the sound wrong - backing track drowns out the dialogue (Selena Steels's Gang Bang Girl DVD from Anabolic). It's still a minefield unfortunately.