A BRIEF VISIT TO REGION 2 by Dan Ramer

DVDFILE.COM "foreign correspondent" Dan Ramer recently visited London, and took a brief look at the state of DVD in Region 2. Here is what he found...

My wife and I had been saving our frequent flyer miles for the last eighteen months, ever since our last vacation. When we finally had enough, we made a serious swap for two tickets to London with a return from Paris. The EuroStar via the Channel would take us from one city to the other.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Dan's got to be pretty obsessed with DVD to take time away from these fascinating cities to look into how our favorite little discs are doing overseas. I guess you're right. (Hey, I only looked in two stores, so I can't be all that crazy. And please keep in mind that since my sample was so small, I can't vouch for the accuracy of any conclusions.)

But, I wanted to know how seriously DVDs had hit the mainstream there. I was curious to know what prices were like. Were retailers pushing the format? Did consumer response provoke an impressive amount of floor space? And how about the reported availability of Region 1 discs?

On our second day in London, we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum. As we walked back to our hotel on Knightsbridge, we found Harrods on Brompton Road, the hugely famous and famously huge department store. Here, spread over fifteen acres of space on several floors, you can find displayed everything from jellybeans to automobiles. We bought a couple of apple tarts in one of the wonderful food halls, admired a large and frightfully expensive bust of King Tut, and drifted through the store.

In the home electronics section, several 16x9 plasma displays caught my eye; each was priced at over $10,000. On one, Batman Forever on DVD was being shown. I took a closer look. After positioning myself for a viewing angle equivalent to what I have in my home theater (about 42 degrees), I noticed that Poison Ivy's green costume clearly showed the screen door effect (an artifact of the discrete nature of plasma displays). The picture was a tad soft as well. Plasma is not ready for prime time; for that kind of money, you'd be better off with a front projector.

(For those of you asking how I knew my field-of-view was about the same as home, try this. Face your display. Hold out your straightened arm in front of you, parallel with the floor. Make a fist, then extend your thumb and pinky away from one another as far as they'll go. The distance from thumb tip to pinky tip is one Ramer - different for all viewers, of course. Measure your screen width in Ramers by simply rotating your arm at the shoulder as you look through one eye only. Now you can compare your screen width with other displays and motion picture screens. If you take the trouble of using a yardstick to measure the distance between your eye and your hand, and the distance between your fingertips, you can easily calculate the angle. My Ramer is about 12 degrees.)

There were several other 16x9 sets using direct view tubes, as well as more conventional aspect ratio sets. Several had letterboxed films on display. There seems to be a significant cultural difference between Britain and America (and as I would soon learn, between France and America) concerning letterboxing. Overseas, broadcasts of letterboxed programs and films are common.

Now, admittedly, their picture quality is superior to our NTSC. Britain uses PAL and France uses SECAM. Both have higher bandwidths for chroma than NTSC, resulting in better color detail and less color smearing. Both are 625 scan line systems, 100 more lines than in the US, and consequently offer about 20% more vertical resolution without a 16x9 enhanced video squeeze. So throwing away lines creates less of a problem there.

But the real difference is the tolerance for those black bars on top and bottom of the screen. That's cultural. The DVD section was just beyond home electronics, and here I found a respectable selection of hundreds of Region 2 titles. Established Warner titles were being sold for a penny less than sixteen pounds. That's $26. There was no indication of a sale, so I'm assuming that this is the list price. You can figure out for yourselves what a savvy British DVD buyer pays. Not bad. So far, no surprises. Typical? I can't be sure.

What's significant is that Harrods is as upscale mainstream as you can get. And DVD was prominently displayed. My tolerant wife yanked me away from the racks and made sure that I concentrated on the native culture for the rest of our London stay. Our visit to France was quite wet. It rained each and every day, while the temperature hovered around fifty. On the first day, we were walking down the Champs-Elysees toward the Louvre when we were caught in a fast moving cell of heavy rain. As luck would have it, a Virgin Megastore was within sprinting distance, so we ducked inside.

After asking for the location of the Deh-Veh-Dehs, I was directed to the top floor. There, I was greeted with a huge line of racks, 43 cabinets wide, all but one holding 64 different titles. Most were Region 2 DVDs, but around 1200 were imports from Region 1. And there was a small section dedicated to Asian imports. So much for regional coding.

Here, Warner titles were on sale for 179 Francs (about $30), down from the normal 229 Francs (about $38). Unlike in the States, Buena Vista titles were being sold for the same price as Warner and MGM titles. (Editor's Note: Warner distributes most Buena Vista titles outside of Region 1.) So it would seem that our French friends are paying somewhat more than we are. And judging by the size of the DVD section, they're enjoying every minute of it.

To complete an exhausting day at the Louvre, we stopped in the museum shop. In the multimedia section, there were video tours of the museum for sale. NTSC and PAL VHS tapes were offered. And, amazingly, a tour was available on DVD. (Now that's market penetration.) Unfortunately, it was being offered only in PAL for regions 2 through 6 inclusive; it could have made an interesting souvenir. In our hotel room after dinner (served much later than in the States), we would check the TV for the next day's weather. Channel surfing revealed the French tolerance for letterbox. Both film and original programming was frequently offered with black bars top and bottom.

I'll also go out on a limb here as I observe that there seemed to be less violence and more tolerance for sex on French TV. Nudity and simulated sex are not uncommon. There was even a hard-R film shown on RTL9 which started at 10:30 on Friday night (I have no way of knowing if this was a cable channel. It appeared to be a commercial broadcast. Perhaps a reader can enlighten me.) And French society has not broken down as a result.

On the contrary. I have never experienced such crowds and enthusiasm for cultural events. Art museums offering special exhibits were mobbed (and not with tourists) beyond what I've experience in New York and Los Angeles. Some museum entry lines resembled those for the original releases of the Star Wars films.

But I digress. I just thought you might enjoy a few brief observations on the state of DVD overseas. I had the distinct impression that DVD is going to be with us for a while. It seems to be a truly international phenomenon.

»» Go to PART 2 OF THIS REPORT

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