Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was suspicious of this DVD set because of its low price, but since the third party Amazon seller selling it was named "Annenberg CPB" at the time, I thought there may have actually been a chance Annenberg Media had truly lowered their prices on this older series and Amazon is just as logical a distribution partner as any other these days so I thought I'd give it a shot. Shortly after I placed my order, the seller changed his name to "JCB Dist," which was my first indication something fishy was going on here. Nevertheless, this is a review of the product, not the seller, so I'll get back to the product itself. I have two genuine sets of Destinos DVDs to compare these pirated ones to. I have an earlier ~2002 version of Destinos and a later ~2007 version one. The DVDs received look nothing like my genuine Annenberg Media Destinos DVDs that are available directly from the Annenberg Media website. Annenberg Media charges a couple hundred dollars for just Part I and the same high price for just part II of Destinos, so finding a complete set for less than one picture of Ben Franklin is suspicious to begin with. The DVDs received aren't commercially-produced: They are purple 4.7 GB DVD-R's, which is easy to determine not just because the ink on the disks is purple (instead of silver), but because the hologram marks on the inner ring of the dics read "CMDR47G," indicating this is a DVD-R, not a DVD. (It's possible the seller takes so long to ship these because he is making them on demand in his basement, but I digress again.) The box itself has some amusing incorrect statements on it such as the statements "The Capretz Method" and "Created by Pierre J. Capretz." While it is true that Yale Professor Pierre Capretz created the similar-format television-based language learning program "French in Action," the "Destinos" series was created by University of Illinois Professor Bill Van Patten and, so far as I have ever been able to tell, "Le Professor" had nothing to do with the development of this Spanish-language series. True, what the outside of the DVD case says has little to do with the contents inside, but the point is that it is more evidence that these DVDs are fakes so if you see these large white DVD "complete set" boxes here or elsewhere on the internet, you can be reasonably assured you're looking at a pirated copy. For what its worth, the authentic Destinos DVDs I have from Annenberg Media have fairly boring purple covers and are distributed as separate "part I" and "part II" sets and are not available in one complete box. As for content, despite these pirated DVDs being marketed as "new 2010" versions of Destinos, the content is, ironically, a rip of the older of my two versions (circa ~2002). I'm pretty sure you weren't buying Destinos for its picture quality, but the 2002 version was a lower-quality transfer, with lots of combing and compression artifacts. Sometimes, it looks like it was transferred straight from a VHS. The menus on the 2007 version actually have less eye-candy than the 2002 version, but they are cleaner and were clearly better made for DVD resolution. The video itself, while still not stunning in the ~2007 version, is better quality than the 2002 version and has far fewer compression artifacts. As I stated earlier, this "new 2010" version is a perfect digital copy of the older lower-quality 2002 version of Destinos. So there you have it: buyer beware. At least if you buy these, unlike me, you'll know beforehand exactly what you're getting.