This evening, we sat down to watch a couple of movies that we haven’t seen for a while. First, we watched “A Knight’s Tale”, which is one of the first movies we ever purchased on DVD. This was back in 2001; over twenty years ago already! After that, we decided to watch one of the more recent DVDs we’ve purchased, X-Men Apocalypse. When I picked up the box from the shelf it almost flew right out of my hand!
The box for X-Men Apocalypse was so light! I never noticed it before, but after just putting down A Knight’s Tale, it was impossible not to notice the difference in weight between the two DVDs. I even opened up the box to A Knight’s Tale, once again, to ensure that there wasn’t a booklet or something inside, which was adding the extra weight. There wasn’t! It was just a single liner note page and the DVD itself, just like the X-Men box.
The difference was the plastic box, itself. The Knight’s Tale box was a nice, thick, heavy plastic; well designed to protect the DVD inside. The X-Men box, however, was one of those new-style, ridiculously thin recycled plastic boxes that will fold in and buckle if you happen to sneeze too hard in its direction.
Just out of curiosity, I took the boxes to the digital scale and compared the weights. A Knight’s Tale: 115 grams; X-Men Apocalypse: 62 grams. That is with both boxes containing their DVDs and single liner notes page.
What’s the purpose of making such cheap boxes that are supposed to protect the DVDs inside? They can barely do this! Even my “snap case” cardboard style DVD boxes are better and more rigid than these flimsy things. If the industry is so concerned about the environment, then use the plastic/cardboard snap cases. But, protection is not their purpose. Their purpose is to milk as much money out of us as possible, while giving us products that can barely perform the basics of the tasks they were designed to do; And, to perform those tasks for a minimal amount of time, so we’re forced to re-purchase them after they completely fail after just a few uses.
This is just the level of performance and dependability that we’ve grown accustomed to in this modern “technically advanced” age. Utter crap. Long gone are the days of pride in your work and value for money.
They’re really trying to force us into this digital market, but I’m not going to waste any of my money on that false economy. I will take my VHS, Laserdiscs and DVDs to the grave before I give them up. And if they stop producing physical media altogether someday, then that’s fine with me. It a rare thing to find a new movie I want to watch anyway. Besides, most new movies these days are just remakes of movies and T.V. shows from the 80s and 90s, which I’m likely to already have.
[tag]dvd, movies[/tag]