Review of Ultimate DVD Gold, The

Introduction

What is a demo DVD?

A demo DVD should have a range of clips and examples to show of the capabilities of your home cinema setup including sound a vision demos along with demos of how certain DVD features work.

Well, having Gold in the title you have to expect some pretty good demos to show all the qualities of your DVD setup. Having had the opportunity to take a look at the said DVD here are some observations of what it offers the Home Cinema fan and what it fails to deliver.

Video

All the footage is NTSC on this region 0 disk even though it’s available in the UK mainstream.
A PAL version would have been better as I can see NTSC causing problems for less technically orientated users of this DVD.

The visuals are mixed formats (Full Frame and Widescreen/Anamorphic), as it’s a demo disk this is to be expected.
The picture quality is ‘mediocre’ to ‘good if not outstanding’.

Some of the best quality visuals are to be found on the actual film footage such as the John Woo clip used to illustrate parental control.
Some of the worst visuals are to be found on the transfers of some of the ‘Play and Watch’ sections that seem to have come from Video masters and look truly awful.

Audio

The disk has a full range of sound formats used and offers various comparisons between the different formats. Most of these comparisons however use different source material for each format so they are not actually that useful it picking out the formats advantages and disadvantages.

There are some nice musical pieces on the disk. The Alan Parsons piece sounds very good in the stereo demo. On the whole however the audio is a very mixed bag.

Features

It would be hard to say that this DVD actually has anything in the way of special features due to it nature as a collection of demos.

Conclusion

If you’re after a demo DVD to test and tune your equipment there are much better DVD’s out there, Video Essentials anyone?
If you after a DVD to show off to your mates you are better off with a good film demo like ‘The Matrix’ or a good audio demo like ‘Eagles - DTS’

This leads me to have to conclude that this DVD really does not no where to pitch it’s self and unfortunately as a result comes over as a very average DVD with nothing to make it stand out and nothing much to make it worth buying.