Okinawa Underwater (1992) [00MW-0001]

This disc was the first Hi-Vision disc I bought. It is also an intriguing one as it
was Sony's first commercial MUSE release ( see reference number xxx -0001 ) released in 1994 ! My equipment
consists of the infamous HLD-X0 player along with the SONY MUSE decoder MSC-3000. All this is connected to my ( 8th generation ) Pioneer Kuro
720p plasma display.
( This is without any doubt the best TV display ever made. The colours are just breathtaking so this TV display is perfect to watch this sort of video on. )

I currently have a total of 7 MUSE encoded titles and I also wish to do reviews on my other discs in the future, too, however I can already say that
this disc is without any doubt and by far the best-looking one. My second favourite release is the Maeda: Hills of the Seasons disc as it almost one hour long
and also has decent video and audio as long with pleasant accompanying music and typical Japanese landscape shots. This is a lovely disc to fall asleep
to after a long and hard day at work.
"Paris" is a decent MUSE release, too, however it does not feel like a High Definition video release at times.
Long shots barely look HD-ish however some of the closeup views are very impressive.
The two movie titles I have, Basic Instinct and Stargate, look considerably worse. Basic Instinct actually looks worse than my Basic Instinct DVD.
Stargate is a considerable improvement over Basic Instinct however it does not even come close to the brilliance of the Okinawa Underwater disc.

This release is only 21 minutes in lenght and does not feature any extras. I also have a copy of the Japanese DVD release of this title. It contains
the exact same video and audio however also features interviews with the director/photographer of this beautifully shot film
along with some other extras such as the introduction of the various species of fish shown in this video.

Now let me talk about the video quality. The colours are beautiful on my Kuro and I would say that the video does have a HD-ish and Blu Ray kind of feel
to it. I have not seen the Sony Test disc so far but this disc should come close to it in terms of picture quality. You do not see any sort of MUSE compression
( compared to Basic Instinct which looked terrible with severe compression artefacts reminding you of a poorly mastered DVD release ) and the closeup
shots/views are absolutely beautiful. This is a very impressive release however its very short length most certainly is a big downside to it.

There is not much to be said about the audio quality itself. Since it is a typical 2.0 channel release I guess it sounds more or less OK. It features typical
well-known classical music such as longer excerpts from The Nutcracker Suite.

The disc itself does not seem to be one of the rarer MUSE discs out there.

I would like to add some screenshots to this post however I still need to figure out what the best method would be for making decent screenshots.
I will add my other reviews as soon as I find a solution to this problem.