Nasa 50 Years

Rating:
Summary: Perfect for NASA buffs.
Review: I have always been amazed by NASA and all of the moon landings and the space shuttles. This set is all a NASA fan could hope for. It goes into great detail on things like the Challenger diaster, Moon landings, the space shuttles and the Hubble telescope. I bought it thinking that it would be like the Discovery Channel shows but there is more to it. The 5 discs run a little over 11 hours long total. It includes some stuff about the Columbia diaster. It does a thing on the crew members and the shuttle itself. The only thing I did not like was it did not go in detail of the shuttle coming apart. It did not show it happening or did it explain what caused it to happen it just talked about it and showed what the crew did during the mission. The Challenger was given almost an hour on its diaster which was worth the 28 dollars by itself. Over all very interesting and informative. If your a Space and Nasa kind of person you can not go wrong with this set.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting content but mediocre video quality
Review: While this set presents plenty of very interesting NASA produced documentaries, its image quality leaves much to be desired. It is understandable that most videos are more than 30 years old, so one can't expect DV like resolutions. However, the image quality in the first 4 discs is at best comparable to a typical VHS tape.

The 5th disc -- which covers the ISS and recent shuttle flights such as John Glenn's and Columbia's disaster -- has better video, but it's still similar to a PAL video broadcast. So while the content is unique to DVD series, be aware that the transfer leaves much to be desired. If you're hoping to find high resolution footage of the space vehicles in all their glory (as I was), this shortcoming may be quite disappointing.

As an unrelated note, my set had no region encoding. This is reasonable since NASA material is released to the public domain and shouldn't be published in a restricted format.