Online-Comments Watch: Are people just stoopid, or helpless, or what?

I'm not saying there aren't better Blu-ray players on the market, but my eerily compact, incredibly inexpensive region-free Orei BDP-A3 does everything I can imagine asking it to do and is working just fine, thank you! The remote control too. Some of those online commenters really need help.

by Ken

I'm realizing that after all these years, I may have acquired something like religion, the object of my worship being Amazon Gold Box Specials. Well, mostly the video offerings thereof. Let me see, there were DVD offerings of the complete Dick Van Dyke Show, Route 66, Columbo, M*A*S*H, Larry Sanders Show,X Files, Friday Night Lights, Friends -- those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. Shows of which I have fond memories, which became irresistible at the offered prices.

And then came the fateful offering: the complete James Bond films, all 23 from Dr. No through Skyfall, for (as I recall) $100. All in their digital remasterings, with boatloads of special features. A lot of the later ones I'd never even seen, since I'd pretty much lost interest somewhere about midway through the slog. Which is to say I didn't have enough interest to pony up the asking price for a first-run movie in my neck of the woods, and while they all turned up on TV, and I tried to watch parts of couple of them, on a 31-inch CRT TV Bond films are just silly. For the same reason, I had never bought a Bond film in any home video medium -- not even the earlier ones of which I had happy recollections.

Now, however, I had not just my first HD TV, a lovely Samsung LED 40-incher, but my new Toshiba LED 50-incher. Still not ginormous by contemporary standards, I realize, but a medium in which it seemed to it might just be possible to have at least a low-end-ish Bond film experience. And so, with my now-familiar lack of resistance to Gold Box video offerings, I hit the "order now" button and dispatched the remaining formalities. (See "Blu-ray Watch: Pick a James Bond film, any James Bond film," December 6.)

The only problem was that I now had my first 23 Blu-ray discs on order, with no device to play them on. But I knew how to deal with that. I just had to get the appropriate "order now" button in range of my mouse-button-clicking right index finger! I did some quick online poking to see what I might be able to score in a multi-system model, since I have so many British DVDs. (It's not just the obvious British TV series and films that I've found not just available but significantly cheaper on amazon.co.uk than -- where they're available -- on amazon.com. Like I've got Seasons 1 and 2 of Mad Men, all there were at the time, on PAL DVDs.)

And I found a model, startlingly inexpensive, that claimed to play not just foreign DVDs but foreign Blu-rays as well. I had no idea whether I would be acquiring foreign Blu-rays, but it was nice to know that I would be able to play them if I did. And to my amazement, without doing any further investigating, I went ahead and ordered the machine, produced by a company, Orei, I'd never even heard of. I mean, with the Amazon Bond-film order already being processed, the clock was ticking. I had to have a Blu-ray player!

Indeed I wound up having my 23 Bond films a number of days before the Blu-ray player. (This is not meant as a plug, but Amazon tends to be very speedy with those orders.) Meanwhile, I went back and did some after-the-fact remedial research, trying to find out whether I'd done something irreparably stupid.

Sure enough, I found a heap of online reviews of the player I'd ordered. And sure enough, there was the expectable mix of buyers reporting that the unit is a marvel (dream-come-true) and that it's a piece of garbage (save-your-money).

I'm coming to understand the logic of those evalutaion-analysis systems that start by throwing out the highest and lowest scores. In the case of user reviews, I don't doubt that they reflect the evaluators' experience with the product, but they seem to reflect the standard range of human experience rather than the kind of experience an average user is likely to have with it. Of course if the reviews are overwhelmingly weighted to either the dream-come-true or save-your-money end, that may tell you something. But otherwise, I'm probably better off trying to extract some plausible information from the mass of in-between reviews.

What got me to writing tonight, however, is those low-end reviews of the Blu-ray player, which I admit made me a little jumpy, with the thing already in the processing-and-shipping pipeline. There were repeated complaints, for example, about the remote, which was claimed to be a piece of junk. There was at least one review that carried the piece-of-junk remote analysis to the whole damned unit, saying it worked fine out of the box but the next day stopped working and had to be returned.

What I didn't see was any mention of the fact that, at least as far as I can tell, the thing can't be operated except via the remote. I admit that I've never looked inside the small manual (I know it's around somewhere, but don't ask me where), but I haven't even found a way to get the disc tray to open or close without the remote. I don't know that this would have dissuaded me from the machine, but I wouldn't have minded knowing about it.

No doubt the absence of controls on the unit itself, again at least as far as I can find, seems clearly a function of its size -- it's terrifyingly tiny, maybe the size of a not-very-thick book. The space-saving feature isn't of much use to me, at least now, but I'm sure it's a real attraction for some users.

As it happens, I did have the experience of finding the player "locked" the second day it was plugged in. I realized, though, that I hadn't turned it off the day before, figuring it would do an auto shutoff, and I suspected that I may have put it through a quick series of shifting commands at the end of that first use. So I thought perhaps it simply needed to be reset. I didn't know whether there was a "reset" button, so I applied the low-tech solution: I unplugged the damned thing. And when I reconnected it, it was fine. That has happened once since, when I also had left the unit on rather than shutting it off manually. And again, as soon as it was "reset," it was fine. Since then, I've taken the precaution of shutting it off when it's not in use. I haven't had any further problems with it.

As for the remote, it too is very small -- roughly palm-size. That hardly means that it's a piece of junk, though. And I suspect that a lot of users will consider its microsity a plus. One thing it does mean is that the device requires AAA batteries, which I've only encountered once, with a really cheap portable-audio-device amplifier that sounded so horrible, I never had occasion to replace the batteries. I almost always have A and AA batteries on hand, but not AAAs. But you know what I did? I bought some and socked them away in the refrigerator for future use. That's even lower-tech than the unplugging-the-player trick.

It's also true that the remote is highly directional, again I'm guessing a function of its compactness. You really have to point it right at the player. But I have other remotes that are also highly directional. I love it when they aren't, when I can just point the remote more or less in the general direction of the unit in question and have it work. Still, I don't think it requires special brain function or manual dexterity to point the thing in the right direction.

Similarly, a couple of buttwipes were denouncing the poor little remote as shoddy because, they claimed, you had to press the buttons too long, or maybe it was that you couldn't press the buttons too long, I forget which. Again, though, how stupid do you have to be to not grasp that every remote is programmed to interpret a certain length as a single "click," and for every remote you use, you have to adjust to its requirements? Most of us quickly learn to do this automatically, even with different timings for different remotes.

Do I have to add that, the above adjustments made, the player has been working just fine? Who knows, maybe it'll die tomorrow. But I've started watching my Bond films, and the complete Downton Abbey Season 1-3 Blu-rays (supposedly in the UK edition, although it's issued by PBS) I ordered on a later Gold Box Special look just wonderful. (I see that the British edition of Season 4 is already out -- luckily at a price I'm much too cheap to pay, especially considering that that's without the presumably just-aired Christmas Special, for which amazon.co.uk was taking pre-orders.)

Still waiting for a chance to get into the little Blu-ray machine are all three seasons of the sublime Canadian series Slings and Arrows (I had the first two seasons on DVD, and before I got around to ordering the third, I loaned out the first and never got it back, so I was probably going to order the Season 1-3 box on DVD anyway; I see that my Blu-ray set has lots of special features, which my individual-season DVDs didn't have at all!), and fresh out of the mailbox today the Blu-ray set of all three Godfather films in Francis Coppola's restored edition. I had the three films on VHS and Laserdisk, and I can hardly wait to see them in Blu-ray on the 50-inch TV.

The irony isn't lost on me, as I believe I may already have mentioned: that here I was, so soon after lambasting the masters of the Breaking Bad video release for making the great collector's edition of the complete series with all those neat extras and special features, as well a bunch of kitschy schlock, in Blu-ray only ("As of now, the message from "Breaking Bad" to non-Blu-ray fans seems to be: Drop dead!," September 30), and now not only have I slithered over to the Blu-ray side but I did it apparently too late to snag a copy at a vaguely human price.

Well, there's bound to be a "regular" complete Breaking Bad release, on both DVD and Blu-ray. And so far I feel no need to replace my DVDs, which I have to say are looking pretty good through my Pioneer multisystem DVD players as well as the Orei Blu-ray player. (For the record, the Orei player switches automatically for non-NSTC DVDs, but it has to be manually selected for Zone B and C Blu-rays -- the codes for which were included by my dealer.)

Just what I needed in my life: incentive to watch more TV!

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