I will admit I was pretty late in switching to DVDs. In fact, most of my anime collection is still on VHS. I will not rebuy series I already own in entirety, and I have no problem in having some seasons all on DVD, while others all in VHS. Normally I'm pretty open to new technologies, but for me DVDs were a slow transition to make. I just didn't see what was so great about them. Granted, animated series look a lot better on DVD, but for the most part I could not really detect any grand difference between VHS or DVD on a CRT TV. And some recent events have really had me question the technology.

Follow up:

A few months ago I bought the collector's addition of Batman: The Animated Series. It was a nice set that had all the episodes, a documentary about the creation of the show and cool art book. The original price was 85 dollars, with the cheapest version I could find being 75. So when I saw on Craigslist someone was selling the collection for 55, I jumped at the chance. I carefully examined each disk to check if they were warped or scratched or in some other way defective. As far as I could tell they were in working order. In the last few weeks I finally got a chance to actually watch the series and I ran into some serious problems. In my DVD player towards the middle or end of the disk, 3 or four episodes would not work. They would freeze, skip, or in some other way shutdown. I checked in my computer to find they worked just fine and that's when I got a little worried. Did I somehow get a bootleg? I carefully examined each disk: they had the correct copyright and licensing data printed on the disks, all the printing was well done on high quality materials and there wasn't a lick of Engrish to be found. And then I realized, the disks were just that screwy.

And it occurred to me this was not the first time I ran into similar problems. I bought some ALF DVDs from Target and the first disk of the first season nearly destroyed my player. The disk would freeze and the machine would make the most awful noises. I tried it in my computer and a similar thing happened. I had to return the sets. The replacement set didn't cause the same problem, but there were menu coding errors. Menu coding errors seem to be a common problem: my Slayers, Veronica Mars and 'The Apartment' DVDs all have them. One of my mom's movies you have to go around a menu to get access the special features because from the menu they don't work, and on my Angelic Layer DVDs you can't turn off the subtitles!

And it's not just the disks themselves, but the cases that break. When I bought UP the case was broken before I even opened the disk, and the acrylic used to hold my Batman and Veronica Mars disks keep snapping (FYI, acrylic is not a good plastic to use on disk cases anyway because there is almost no flex to it). A few weeks ago I saw on That Guy With The Glasses a guy have a seven minute rant about the horrible packaging on his Predator disks (as in the disks were just glued to a cardboard insert as opposed to actually being held with your typical prongs)

I am not a well off person, but I paid good money for every set and movie I bought (granted, I never pay full price for anything, but in hindsight I'm really glad) and most of the time have bought them in recognizable, legitimate stores. I didn't get Chinese or Malayasian bootlegs off Ebay, or el cheapo dollar store DVDs (ironically, the dollar store movies I do have work perfectly) and yet I don't see much difference between the so called 'legit' disks and the other ones. When people pay 15 bucks for a movie, 40 bucks for a TV season or 50 bucks for part of an anime season I think they should get disks that aren't glitchy, won't threaten their machines and plain work without having to figure out an alternate way to access features.