I have had the DVD box set for years but when my wife decided she wanted to see it, I found an excuse to buy the very reasonably priced Blu Ray set.



There are multitude of reviews about how great the whole series is so I won't waste time talking about the excellent writing, acting, directing, effects, etc. And I won't go on about the excellent interviews with the (then) surviving members of Easy Company which are sprinkled through the series and available in more depth as part of the extras. I learned while rewatching this recently that Major Winters died in only January of this year. He comes across both in the series and in interviews as an ordinary man who, when put in extraordinary circumstances faced them in the way I would hope to if placed in the same situation. It seems like he had a nice life after the war, and he was surely one man who very much earned the peace he craved.



Onto the technical aspects of the Blu Ray box set. The tin box is very nice and although the internal fold out box is a little cumbersome and delicate looking, mine did not fall apart in my hands as others have described in their reviews. Picture quality is top notch and serves as a great example of what Blu Ray is all about. However, for me, the sound is what makes the biggest difference. It is truly awesome and deserves to be heard in full lossless 5.1 surround sound.

Extras wise, aside from the usual extra 'making of' and interview features, there is a nice timeline feature which gives you additional information about all sorts of things ranging from military terms colloquialisms through to more detail on specific operations, military ranks and other things which may only get a passing reference in the series.

There is also Picture in Picture interviews with the men of easy company but be aware if you have a home cinema sound system that the audio from them will only work if you set your player to output 'PCM' audio rather than 'Bitstream'. It would have been nice if there was a note on the disc or in the box to inform oyu of this; I only found out through searching on line as I thought I had either a faulty Blu Ray player or a faulty disc!



I'm not a big flag waver but one thing this series definitely does is serve as a reminder of the sacrifices made by those who fought in the second world war. If you're not teary eyed or at least moved by the end of the series, you must be made of stone.