DVD Trail of the Broken Blade
IVL

image

Decent image, but quite disappointing for the compression. IVL was doing better before, let's hope it's just an accident. Otherwise the image looks ok, lacking sharpness for a 16/9 (but on a normal TV, you won't really notice), but quite clean and without too many signs of restoration.

sound

A mono track would have been more than welcomed. Here the central channel is the original mono, not as clear as the best IVL Shaw Brothers, but still ok. The surround and lateral channels are new, and too clear, if not useless (those bloody birds...). Hearable, but a bit annoying from time to time.

subtitles

No particular problem...

special features

The usual special features (poster, pics, bios, trailers...) + a nice documentary about Chang Cheh. Not as good as the "special" editions by IVL, but still interesting.

menus

Still menus, with a very good looking cover.

quality/price ration

This DVD is a bit disappointing with an image suffering from compression problems, and a slightly annoying 5.1 track. Let's hope IVL will fix all that in the new batch of DVDs.

16 June 2004
François | his/her reviews