Product: The Great Queen Seondeok Vol. 1 (2009)
Rating: 4.0
One of the best Korean period dramas, but DVD falls short.
I won't get into how great this series is as others have already done a fine job of that. I'll just say that after watching 20 episodes online I already decided I had to own the DVDs. Quite unlike other Korean period dramas, Queen Seon Duk, for a while, was like one long movie. And it was great. But then the first of a few lulls arrived and the series entered into soap opera mode killing its momentum. Fortunately the lulls don't last that long, but they are there. And I hate to say it but I don't feel the story did enough to justify why the hero of the show... should be the hero. That aside, this is easily my second favorite Korean period drama.Now, as for the DVD's themselves. I was expecting them to be at least the same quality of Yes Asia Entertainment releases, especially considering their absurdly high price tag. But these official MBC discs fall somewhere between the Yes Asia quality standard and that of the cheap Hong Kong releases. What I noticed at first was the thin boxes. They didn't feel sturdy like YA Entertainment releases. They're thin and soft and kinda flimsy. I bought all three volumes and one box was dented, one plastic tray cracked and 2 discs were loose in the packaging. So far they play fine, but still, it's pretty annoying to dish out a hundred dollars and find that MBC is trying to save money by cramming as many discs as they can into one box.The picture quality is not horrible (most of the time), but it's far from good. Or, again, far from being worth the price you have to pay. At times the image is grossly over-sharpened and hard to watch. This happens especially during interior scenes. A clearly visible "halo" is apparent along any edge in the picture. They went way overboard with trying to make the show look better that they wound up ruining it.Some discs hold 2 episodes, but most hold 3 and it's then that the video compression really shows. Slow movement looks fine, but when things pick up with the fighting and battle scenes you clearly see grossly apparent pixelation and compression. I almost felt like I was back to watching them online again.The DVD menu is annoying and unfriendly. Each screen takes too long to fade in. The menu doesn't tell you what episodes are on the disc. It just shows you the first episode broken up into 4 chapters. You need to click, click, click through a lot of "Next" buttons to get to the next episode. There are interlacing problems as the menu flicks up and down one pixel when you press buttons. For some reason the opening theme is only shown once at the front of each disc, and sometimes not at all. The closing credits aren't usually shown till the end of the last episode on the disc. Between each episode (in lieu of the opening theme) is a screen shot with the episode number. And this is kinda funny: it's in the "STAR WARS" font. If that weren't inappropriate enough, the font is also hard to read when numbers are shown. Nines look like zeroes and such.Bottom line: great show. These MBC discs are far from high quality, but they are the best versions you'll be able to get unfortunately.