- Convenience good, scans bad.I really can't give this many Spider-man comics all tucked away in one DVD anything less than 4 stars. This convenience is probably why you are considering buying this and reading my review. All the comics are scanned in as double page spreads, adds and all. Since the scans were made two pages at a time, the comic spread open on its staples on the scanning bed, sometimes one of the pages is crooked as the comic didn't open neatly. Not really a big deal as no one reads a comic opened perfectly flat anyway. The comics are read in Adobe Reader, and if your monitor is 13" wide or more you can read the comics at actual size (in full screen mode).
So far so good. If GIT left well enough alone they'd have a perfect product (missing the Giant Sizes of the mid 70s unfortunately). However, it was decided to "clean-up" the old issues by brightening the backgrounds until they were super-white (even when the originals were fresh off the press they weren't this white), which results in significant color fading and color loss, not to mention that nobody enjoys looking into a bright white computer screen- it tires the eyes. Matters are made worse by applying an unsharp mask filter indiscriminately to every page, which creates some bizarre effects with the benday dot patterns. I would much rather they just left the scans alone. What we are left with are faded and grainy versions of the originals.
I could mention that, over 40 years, every Spider-man reprint has been botched in some way, but actually there are decent CBR files being exchanged around the Internet that are superior in quality to these scans, though you don't get all the adds, and the early Ditkos are not from the originals like they are on this set. So if you want every page and add from Spider-man #1 you'll have to get this disc, which comes in a colorful, gatefolded cardboard box that has no function whatsoever.
Don't go thinking they'll let you save any of these pages as jpegs. They're read only.
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