Review of Portrait of Africa

Introduction

Not having seen any of the other titles in the "Portrait of" series, I was interested by this DVD as whilst the box says "Few have ever witnessed the untouched splendor of Africa" - I was fortunate enough to have been to Kenya some years ago to visit my late Grandfather who worked there for many years.

Video

Make no mistake, this is the worst video quality that I have seen on DVD yet. The amount of grain is quite staggering, with the picture reaching VideoCD quality at times - I`ve got VHS tapes that look better than this DVD. The quality is not helped by some shots having so little resolution that they look "artificial".

On some of the flypast sequences, the picture quality is made even worse by a motion-blur type of effect which lowers the detail and resolution to almost unbelievable levels and also annoyingly leaves a stationary mark on the lower left hand side of the screen.

Audio

The soundtrack has promise with music by Vangelis, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Miriam Maleba but is ultimatly let down by a Dolby Digital Stereo transfer which would appear to have come from an analogue master as the some background hiss becomes evident when the volume is turned up. The music itself is fine but a 5.1 mix would have been nice and might have gone some way to make up for the video shortcomings.

There`s no commentary during the feature.

Features

There are no extra features, not even a proper menu - the one and only screen on offer is the selection.

Conclusion

This DVD was a big disappointment. The strong imagery of Africa is spoilt by the very poor picture quality and lacklustre sound.

The content itself is slightly repetitive at times and doesn`t seem to be put together in any particular order and as there`s no commentary, the viewer has no idea where in Africa they are at any given moment. Rearranging the video into "regions" with captions showing the viewer rougly where they were would be most beneficial!

If the image was cleaned up and the sound remixed into 5.1, this would move from being a poor DVD to an average one. The content does not warrant a repeat viewing and when added to the quality problems this DVD certainly does not represent good value for money and therefore cannot be recommended.