The West Wing Complete Series DVD Box Set - Seasons 1-7 | Political Drama TV Show Collection | Perfect for Binge Watching & Gift Giving

My wife and I are big fans of this series. Smartly written, well-acted, and an all-star cast make this one of the best series we've ever watched. We've enjoyed this series many times over starting with the original broadcast on NBC, then again multiple times through our DVD sets. Yeah, I said "sets". plural, because we watched the first set so much, we wore out some of the disks and had to replace the whole seven season set.We were early HDTV adopters, having bought our first rear projection HDTV well before this series started in 1999. While the first season was broadcast in SD, the second and subsequent seasons were in HD. With this Blu-Ray set, the first season has a decent HD conversion with a 16:9 format instead of the original 4:3. The second through seventh seasons are all in 1080p HD as well though the image quality appears to be a tick better than on the first season. Overall, the visual quality is considerably better than it is on our entirely SD DVD set and at least as good as I remember it being when seasons 2-7 were originally broadcast on our first-generation HDTV.I can only surmise the reasons that some reviewers have commented that this HD set is only "slightly" better than SD and at times "grainy." One possibility is that they wrote their reviews based on the quality of season one only and before starting the second season. Another is that they don't have a DVD set to compare the quality of this Blu-Ray set to. Yet another is that they don't understand the limitations of the original grainy film stock on which the show was captured. Does it compare favorably to shows and movies captured more recently in digital 4K? No, but it does live up to the celluloid standards and the industry medium of choice at the time the show was made.With regard to the negative comments about the packaging, again, I can only surmise the reasons. This set has 20 fewer disks than our DVD set, but it still has a total of 28 disks. That's a lot of disks. The packaging is as compact as it can be made with that many disks and is less than half the size of the packaging for our DVD set. Unlike some other reviewers, I like the fact that the disks are securely attached to their respective pockets. Far too often with sets like this, the disks come loose, rattle around inside the case and become damaged and unreadable. It's pretty clear that will never be an issue with this Blu-Ray set.Bottom line, the show is one of our all-time favorites and a real treat to see it again now in the HD format seasons 2-7 were originally broadcast. The visual quality is what you would expect from the original film stock and the 5.1 DTS surround sound fills our theatre room beautifully. If you are looking for nits to pick, I'm sure you'll find them in anything you buy. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a copy of this series in all the glory it was originally broadcast, this Blu-Ray set delivers in spades.Enjoy!