Avatar (Two Disc Blu-Ray/DVD Combo) Glitch Filled Disaster

Glitch FIlled Time Eating Mess, April 25, 2010

By	gadlaw (Erewhon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Avatar (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo) [Blu-ray] (Blu-ray)

The movie itself is fun, an experience and an event that I went to see in the Theater a couple of times. This Two-Disc Blu-Ray/DVD Combo is an absolute disaster and not worth the headaches it causes. First of all the DVD is blurry. I know that DVD is supposed to be less sharp than a Blu-Ray version of the same movie but in this case it seems as if they made a concerted effort to create something extra blurry. I've seen DVD's that are as sharp and clear as their Blu-Ray counterparts so I know it's not a limitation of the material at hand. It seems almost purposeful to me and if it's not on purpose then it's incompetence because either way you have a inferior DVD product.

Now let's talk about the Blu-Ray disk. I have a newer Blu-Ray player and it was unable to play this disk. A Sharp player, I was told by the disk itself that I would need to 'update my firmware' in order to play this disk. How many times have you had to 'update the firmware' on your DVD player? Never right? It just worked. With this technology they wait until there is a must buy DVD and tweak their product, making many Blu-Ray players unable to work and you need to be technologically proficient to do the updating. Computerless people are out of luck I would guess. Well, I am proficient with the computer and found an 'update' for my Blu-Ray player which after a few hours of trying to get the unzipped file on a USB Drive I was able to update the player. Great. I put in the Blu-Ray disk and a third of the way through it I am confronted with a glitch. The scene selection dialog and the graphics for it come up every minute for two hours of the movie. I can press the menu button when it comes up and the menu comes up, the scene select graphics fade, I press the menu button again, it goes away and the scene select graphics pop back up to cover a third of the screen. It does this for the second two thirds of the movie. I find as I google it, sure enough, it's a verified 'glitch' that affects some Blu-Ray players and not others.

You need to return this two disk disaster and get your money back. It's a defective product on both counts, the DVD and the Blu-Ray disk. I don't even know what sort of extra DRM and other 'enhancements' they needed to make to make your Blu-Ray experience more slow and painful but that's what they did. Return this Turkey, complain to the manufacturer of the movie or don't buy it at all. It's really a disaster.