This Hungarian edition is particularly interesting because it’s Region 2, it’s called Fantazia in Hungary, but the English soundtrack is available from a choice of 6 languages.

I also noticed that GlacierDVD.co.uk are selling an import edition, I recently purchased a DVD from them and it was perfect with a nice and fast delivery time too.

It’s odd that Fantasia 2000 has become more rare that the original Fantasia, though both are collectible.

It’ll be interesting to see how soon Fantasta 200o is to be released in Blu Ray.

The one Genuine Disney DVD that I bought on eBay came from Hong Kong and is a Mainland China DVD.

I have been to China on many occasions and I never managed to find Beauty and the Beast 2-Disc Special Edition in any of the shops there, so when I saw this on eBay I was keen to add it to my collection.

It took about 3 weeks to arrive, but to be fair the seller did make that clear in the description, but it was well worth the wait!

This is a very high quality distribution indeed, packed with special features and undoubtedly 100% Genuine Disney.

To really confuse things though, it does have 2 holograms on the front cover, one is a Disney filmstrip style hologram and the other is a Chinese circular hologram which is found on both genuine and counterfeit DVDs in China.

In my honest opinion, this is the highest quality Beauty and the Beast DVD that I have ever seen.   In contrast the USA 2-Disc edition, which is also licenced in parts of Asia and South America, is awful quality in places, I have heard all the technical reasons why that is so and accepted them in the past, but this one is faultless so why cant the US edition be this good?

This distribution does include a paperback storybook which is totally Chinese language, and most of the text on the box is in Chinese, however the DVD itself is English and subtitles may be turned off easily.

I think this is a great addition to any Disney Collection.  See more images below.

I found this for sale in a market stall in Beijing a couple of months ago.

Note the spelling  SIMBA ‘SPRIDE

This is a blatant counterfeit, though I have seen spelling mistakes like this on some genuine Asian DVDs also.

What’s interesting is that I also ordered the Region 1 USA version from Amazon and I must say that the Asian version is far higher quality, both the packaging and the picture quality of the Asian version are far higher than the USA edition that I bought on Amazon.  Also, It’s always nice to have a Disney Hologram and the USA version has no hologram (this is normal on many USA Disney DVDs now) but this Asian one does have the Genuine Disney Hologram on the front.

Not all Asian Disney have holograms and to further confuse things many fakes DO have holograms whilst many genuine ones do not.  This always comes as a surprise to European Disney DVD buyers because UK and European edition always seem to have holograms on the cover and newer titles even have a hologram embeded in the center of the physical DVD.

This edition includes some nice extras including an animated short entitles ‘The Legend of The Chihuahua” and a nice commentary by the director Raja Gosnell.

It’s increasingly common for Thailand to release a movie on DVD 2-4 weeks prior to release in the UK.

This Iron Man DVD is an excellent example, it’s super high quality in both it’s packaging and it’s quality.

The price in Thailand is about 4 UK Pounds, this is quite high compared to most new DVDs sold in Thailand.

This release is by Pacific Marketing who are seem to be the first to market mith most new hollywood movies in Thailand.

Some more images are below:

Why are there so many counterfeit DVDs on eBay? I don’t know the answer to this question but it really bugs me that there are so many OBVIOUS copies, and eBay do not seem to CARE!

I tried to buy a ORIGINAL USA REGION 1 Disney Beauty & The Beast recently, discarding the hundreds of obvious fakes I bought one, and a copy arrived.  I complained, filed a complaint with paypal and ordered another from another seller…again a copy, again a paypal complaint and refund followed by my ordering another.. you guessed it, another blatent counterfeit.

It would not be so bad, but I really did read the description and they all claimed to be genuine Region 1 USA versions, none were.

I just did a search again and 99% of the Disney Beauty and the Beast DVDs on eBay.com are FAKE.

Am I over reacting here!  Why the hell do eBay allow this kind of shit?

It’s not just DVDs either, I bought some Sennheiser earphones the other week and was sent some obvious fakes that sounded crap, and it’s not like they were cheap either.

eBay, DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS NOW!

Or at least rename your site to ‘eBay, it may be fake but at least it’s cheap..sometimes’

Chinese Disney's Jungle Book DVD

I took the opportunity to buy a couple of genuine Disney DVDs, it’s not the first time that I have bought genuine Disney DVDs from China but on the whole I do find that Thailand and Korea are cheaper.

The DVD pictured above is Disney’s The Jungle Book: 40th Anniversary Edition, it’s manufactured by Intercontinental Video Limited.

Like most Asian Disney DVD s it bears a Disney Hologram, this one is on the spine of the outer sleeve which is unusual for Asian titles which usually have the hologram on the front cover.

Quality overall is excellent, better than many of the US Disney DVDs that I have see.

This title was released all over Asia at the same time as it was released in the USA, however it’s become rare recently in most Asian countries.

Here are some more images.

It’s easy to spot the obvious copy with the photocopied cover and the cheap recordable DVD, but it gets more complicated with factory pressed DVDs.  Often we assume that if a Disney DVD has a spelling mistake then it’s a copy, but this most certainly is not true in every case, below is a scan from the cover of a very genuine Disney DVD that has a obvious spelling error.

Genuine Disney DVD with spelling error

I have shown this to a number of people who have asked “How would Disney allow a DVD to be sold with a spelling mistake?”, the answer is actually quite simple, in most of the world Disney actually have nothing to do with the actual manufacture and/or the printing of the disc or cover.  Disney simply accept a fee from Licensees in return for the rights to distribute DVDs of movies made by Disney.

In theory the distributor has to come up to certain standard to become licenced, but in practice quality of imported DVDs varies a great deal from country to country, as indeed does the price.

British buyers pay the most, but UK Disney DVDs have great quality packaging.  US buyers pay a bit less and often put up with lower overall standards, and then the Asian versions can any standard from high to borderline acceptable standards even for local sales.

A Disney DVD that sells for £15 in the UK can sell for $15 in the US (half the price) and can also be on sale in Asia for as little as £3 (US$6), it may seem obvious that the UK buyer who is paying 5 times as much would expect a higher quality of packaging and presentation but where that £3 DVD is resold on a website to a UK buyer for say £10 then that buyer may well expect a product of equal quality to the others in his or her collection that were probably sourced in the UK.   Often the Buyer shouts “Counterfeit Copy” because it’s simply not what they expected to get and does not match the style of packaging or printing that the buyer is familiar with, sometimes it’s because of an error such as a spelling mistake or sometimes that DVD has a Region 1 logo when it’s actually Region 3 or All Region.

I’m not in a position to say if a saving of 20-30% off the UK retail price makes buying a imported Disney DVD good value or not, that is for the individual to decide, but some customers are more fussy about detail than others.

It’s worth mentioning here why Asian DVDs have so many spelling mistakes:  It’s simply that Asian languages often have phonetic spelling and there can sometimes be 3 or 4 ways of spelling a word that are all considered to be correct, spelling has far less importance to some Asian languages and this means that errors that are obvious to us may be difficult or impossible to spot for a Asian whose primary language is not English.

Other than spelling errors, here are the top reasons for people thinking that some genuine DVDs look like copies:

• Printing on cover or disc may be slightly blurred.
• Quality of printing or packaging materials may feel cheap.
• Position of Asian Disney DVDs differs from UK stock.
• UK Disney often have hologram ring on DVD, Imports do not.
• Import Disney can come in any colour box.

Also, many Asian DVD are manufactured on different presses to the way that UK/US or European DVDs are manufactures, often a burr mark is present on the inner ring of the playing side, this is part of the manufacturing process but causes alarm to some buyers who think it’s a fault, some think it’s been scratched and others think it’s a glue mark!

The internet is full of half-baked guides on how to tell a fake DVD, worst of these guides are the ones found on eBay where anyone with an opinion can write a guide.

Anyone running a counterfeiting operation is, one would assume, perfectly capable of copying the cover from a genuine DVD and duplicating it without making spelling errors, after all a copy by definition is copied.   New release movies that are sold on counterfeit DVDs whilst still showing at the cinema are different, for those there is no real DVD to copy and one would expect that the covers and disc printing are from the imagination of the counterfeiter, in this case there will probably be lots of mistakes and quality overall will nearly always be very poor.

I can say that it’s very hard tell sometimes if a DVD is genuine or counterfeit, at the end of the day the one and only thing that makes a Disney DVD real is if a license fee has been paid to Disney.

Of course, there are lots and lots of counterfeits on the market, and if you are buying on a street corner, from the bloke in the pub, or from a boot sale then the chances are that it may be a copy.

In my personal experience eBay is the biggest culprit.  I used to buy DVDs on eBay but in my experience it’s almost a 99% certainty that I end up with a copy if I buy rare Disney titles on eBay, even when the prices are high.  Sadly these counterfeits are often described as “Imports” which gives real imports a bad name, and that’s a shame because there are some reliable and honest vendors on the web of genuine import Disney movies that represent good value to UK buyers.

Note:  Some writers of “guides” suggest that a reliable way to tell if a Disney DVD is real or not is to ask in a Disney store.  This is terrible advice because staff in a Disney store are in no way trained to do this.  I tried this myself with a genuine import DVD and some spotty teenager who claimed to be an expert on such matters proclaimed that my import DVD was a “obvious copy”.   I asked the spotty teenager if he actually knew what a real import looked like, he admitted that he did not and he added that in his opinion anything that comes from Asia is always a copy!    So don’t waste your time in any UK retail store, all they can do is make a comparison to UK distributed versions which will always be different anyway.

Disney's Sword In The Stone DVD

Disney appear to have decided that the 45th Anniversary of Sword in the Stone was June the 17th 2008 in most of the world, but 18th of August 2008 for the UK.  It’s bad enough that the UK price is higher than any other country without adding insult to injury and making UK buyers wait an extra 2 months.

It’s hardly surprising therefore that many buyers are importing from overseas, like this very high quality edition from Pacific Marketing (Thailand) Ltd.

Compared to other Disney releases in Asia this one is expensive, the 332 Baht price tag translates to $10 or in the UK £5, add a bit of postage and you have a real bargain.

The quality of the packaging on this release is very high quality, Pacific Marketing are the sole licensee in Thailand so we cannot compare it other Thailand distributions, but it’s far higher quality than your average Asia release, higher quality than the USA release.

This is PAL format (Thailand is PAL) and it’s Region 3 which should be no problem as most of today’s players are multi-region or easy to change.

It’s interesting to note that most newer Thailand produced Disney titles do not have the region nor the format written on the disc itself, and this title follows that trend.

Bonus features on this edition include:

• Merlin’s Magical Academy Game
• Bonus Movie Shorts
• Disney Song Selection
• Music Magic: The Sherman Brothers
• And Much More!

Below are some more images, click to zoom.

Counterfeit Blu-ray

I bought this Counterfeit Blu-Ray disc in China the other day, it was one of about 60 titles on display in a shop that is packed full of counterfeit DVDs and CD’s, the shop owner’s English was good enough for him to explain that these are not big sellers in China but that he expects to sell more in the future.

The price was $4, the seller offers normal counterfeit DVDs for less than $1 so that’s quite a premium, but I expect these are a lot more expensive to make.

I tried this is my Sony Blu-Ray player and it seems to work just fine, there are no extra features of any kind, just the movie.

This is the first “real” counterfeit Blu-Ray that I have seen, though the shelves are full of DVD’s with Blu-Ray written on the cover and on the Disc, this one is the first in Blu-Ray format and Blu-Ray packaging that I have seen, though the plastic box is very cheap and really looks fake the disc and insert both appear to be well made.

I guess the Counterfeiters were waiting to see who won the Hi-Def format war before deciding what format to copy, Blu-Ray won an these hit the shelves fairly quickly.

Below are some more nice pictures, click to zoom!