Dae Jang Geum [R1 DVD] YA Entertainment

Wiki Link: http://wiki.d-addicts.com/Dae_Jang_Geum

4:3 Fullscreen

Very high video and audio quality. Interlacing artifacts almost nil.

Subtitles are very good, but lacking punctuation. Apparently the subber is uncertain about the use of any punctuation other than question marks. Periods, commas, exclamation points, semicolons, colons, and ellipses are occaisonally present. The general high quality of the English begs the question of why the punctuation was handled so shabbily.

Update: The quality of the subtitles degrades gradually as the show progresses. Technical language related to food preparation is handled very awkwardly. The bug for "Channel 12" appears in the video in a number of places.

Note that there is no mention of "YA Entertainment" in the video content of the dvd's themselves, but there is a splash for YesAsia.com. Just in case anybody still had doubts about who YA Entertainment is.

Note that a Malaysian set of Dae Jang Geum exists which has very bad subtitles. The subs ripped from the Malaysian set are available on D-Addicts if you want to check them out to convince yourself NOT to buy the Malay set.

Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 6:21 pm Post subject: Post Rating: 0

I have all 3 volumes of Dae Jang Geum that YA subtitled and am very pleased with them. I'm learning Korean, but I'm not that great at it, so I don't know if the Korean to English translations are all that accurate, but just from the English perspective I have little complaints. I've watched the entire set at least 4 times through and I only noticed like 3 grammar mistakes out of the entire 54 episode collection, which is annoying, but not that big of a deal. Punctuation isn't that big of a deal with me if it's only using a period at the end of a sentence or something, but if it's something that helps convey emotion/context like an exclamation point or question mark then I get a little irked.

If any of you got the special Highlights dvd with it, it was pretty obvious that the subber for that dvd was completely different from the guy who subbed the episodes. A lot of the translations are completely different from the ones used in the episodes, and sometimes pretty awkward sounding considering the context of the scene, but not completely butchered. Grammar and spelling are still pretty good, just the translations are a bit different. I was still able to enjoy the special dvd immensely. Overall I'd say this 3 volume set + the Highlights dvd was definitely worth my money.

Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:16 pm Post subject: Post Rating: 0

Since there are NO widescreen screencaps of Jang Geum ANYWHERE, I think it was shot 4:3. even hancinema doesn't have a single widescreen cap... Most of there caps are cropped vertically, and a few are 4:3. I would be VERY HAPPY to be proved wrong and to be given the opportunity to buy dvd's of the widescreen version!!

UPDATE (June 4, 2007): I have now viewed through episode 19 of this set. The subs go completely bonkers in parts of episode 18... It's impossible to make sense of some of them, mostly because they don't capitalise or punctuate properly, so sentences run together madly and collide. The video quality, which seemed awfully GOOD through episode 18, is even better in the second box of dvd's, beginning with episode 19 the video is brilliant. However, there is a lot of panning and scanning going on that makes me believe, with 90% certainty, that this show was shot in 16:9 HD, but possibly ONLY released in the pan-scanned version.