I totally agree with you, Conch! The review really is quite bad and obviously written by somebody who neither really knows the show nor it's "roots" ("Murder, she wrote"?! Really?!)...
However, it was one of the only reviews that came out that early so better than nothing at that point I guess...
As a little update on my experience with the BluRay-box:
I watched (and have recordings of) 720p Broadcasts of all seasons here in Germany, and based on that, the comparison to the BluRays doesn't reveal such a big difference than to the DVDs. But as most of you probably are only interested in the picture quality DVD vs Bluray,
I have to say for most episodes (unfortunately actually only S1-6, but more on that later) it's a great improvement. Much more detail (in darker scenes that also means more film grain, of course.. but I can live with that) and even better (and a wider range of) colours than on DVD.
BUT- and that's what really disappoints and confuses me -
some (really only a few
) episodes are REAL 1080p.
For example, most of Season 1 (e.g. "The ugliest dog" is really brilliant FHD!) and after that, random episodes of seasons 2 to (I think) 5.
It doesn't make any sense to me. Why are only a few episodes remastered in 1080p? The Universal fire might seem like an explaination but I don't think that really was the reason because:
Especially season 8 is terrible, picture quality wise! Well, just exactly as on DVD. It's just upscaled to 1080p. But not even from a 720p source as the earlier seasons are (which is why they really look much better than DVD).
Here, I think they just were lazy and didn't want to spend more money (and I'm speaking of Universal as they provided FF with the digital copies). Or how do you explain all episodes of that season obviously are only in cheap upscaled DVD resolution? Even if they used a bad copy because the first one was destroyed in the fire, it would have shown a little more details than DVD. So, really NO improvement there.
To quote your president... SAD!
As S1 seems to be mostly real Full HD 1080p and the earlier seasons are at least always 720p, sometimes 1080p (e.g. S5: "The man from marseilles", great quality!) I'd say that's ok and definitly better than DVD. But no excuse for the later seasons, S7 is nearly equally as bad (only a few episodes show slight improvement) as on DVD and S8 is a bad joke for a BluRay...! Bad DVD-like colours, very 'soft' image (low DVD resolution)...
Luckily, my favorites are the earlier seasons anyways, so...
So, yeah.. I really have mixed feelings about this...
Oh, and another minus is the company FF. They don't even respond to kind e-mail requests. And in interviews they are like, 'please write an e-mail to us before you write bad reviews online'... Well, but then, at least ANSWER!
I'm curious, anybody else here also made experiences with the BluRay? If so, please share! I'd love to hear some more opinions from fellow Magnum-maniacs