Visions of Britain and Ireland [Blu-ray]

Visions of Britain and Ireland [Blu-ray ]The stars of this new blu-ray set are Ireland and Scotland. Ireland was lacking in the DVD version with a weak narration, poor music selection and a limited set of locations. The narration has been greatly improved, the music is great and many of the added locations have been photographed at street level to give a more balanced view. Five stars for the blu-ray Ireland. I had not seen the Scotland DVD, but this one is outstanding, with gorgeous shots of the countryside and excellent narration and music. Five stars.England is fine, but it has too many shots of palaces and other buildings and not enough of the countryside. Four stars.Wales has been added and is very well done, but since it is a very small country, the number of shots are limited. I spent several hours looking for the bonus shots of Wales, so I called Acorn Media and was told there are no bonus shots of Wales. The narration and music for Wales are excellent.The major advantage of the blu-ray set, since the DVDs were mastered in HD, is the greater capacity of the blu-ray disc. All four countries fit on two disks. I'm looking forward to Greece (maybe Greece and Turkey) on blu-ray and France and Italy. I would like to see a Spain/Portugal set.

Would have given it five stars except the music tended to drown out the narration at times. There are four seperate videos on the disks (England, Scotland, Ireland & Wales) The video is shot from a copter and is excellent giving you views that you will never get any other way. Having maps available to identify where the castles, cities etc. that you are seeing are located will help.

This set is beautifully filmed and narrated. The music is excellent and unobtrusive, and the transfer is clear and crisp.But the scenery! Absolutely beautiful. No video can do justice to the beauty of the Irish countryside, but this one comes darned close!This is available on DVD, but don't do it. Get the BluRay. This is one of those disks that will absolutely justify the extra expense.I always try to find the negatives in my reviews just to give balance but the only one I can come up with on this is that the narration is a bit outdated. They still tout the "Celtic Tiger" economy for example. But that is the worst I can say about this.

So when I purchased this, I hadn't seen it on TV and with all the glowing reviews, I thought, it would a great purchase. I will admit that the visuals are stunning. The problem is the narration. There is very little of it. I would say that it is only narrated 25% of the time with 75% being music. The product description and the blu ray itself have the music only and narration as choices so I assumed the narration track would be extensive. It unfortunately wasn't. I'm not saying I wanted someone to be talking 100% of the time but there are more shots of sites, where nothing is said (only a title at the bottom telling you the name of the site) than sites that are narrated. There are some nice little facts thrown in every once in a while but not enough to really keep our attention. I felt like I needed to get on the internet to look up the sites, just to get an idea what we were seeing. We want to the UK for a family vacation one of these days and I can see this being a nice reminder once we had gone, seen (and learned) about the sites already. But there's no substance, it's just pretty. Maybe my expectations were too high. In the end my wife fell asleep about 1/2 into Britain. It felt more like a teaser or trailer...which is probably what it's meant to be...a teaser to get you to want to go to the UK.

This is a wonderful BluRay video series called Visions. Includes travel videos from many wonderful places around Europe. You can play enjoy the imagery only while listening to a musical background, or listening to a commentary background. The option is yours. Excellent to play it in the background when having visitors at home. I highly recommended as a most relaxing and even informative video series.

The scenery is nice and the short narrative is good. The aerial views make this dvd very worthwhile.

These aerial tours are simply gorgeous. The BluRay quality is first rate and you see the countries in a way the on-the-ground visitor never could. I am always amazed at how close the helicopter seems to the scene but how infrequently people on the ground react. Sometimes the limited narration seems a bit over-the-top, but you have the option of turning it off, leaving only the music. The whole series is well worth having.

This Blu-ray set has breath-taking high-definition aerial views of Great Britain and Ireland, including many of the places we have visited in Great Britain. Fortunately, the narration has an option for subtitles, which is good since the narrators have the local accent of the places they narrate and they can be a little hard to understand at times.

Titles were not planned for Australian release in HD. As it was shot HD I prefer the best quality available.