Compared to the 75th anniversary DVD, Model Railroader upgraded a few things about the experience of reading magazines using their software. The magazines are now presented in a more "bookshelf" way that's straight out of the playbook of Apple's iBook software.
Unfortunately, the MR DVD team decided to go full bore with the skeuomorphism and also added a page turn effect. By default, when going from one page to the next, the page itself will curl and animate as if you were flipping it. This sounds neat but it makes turning pages feel three times as slow. Fortunately there is an option to turn it off.
More annoying however is the software will actually let you turn the pages by clicking in a corner and dragging your mouse, even with the animation option turned off. The problem with this is that the software itself is a bit buggy, and clicking on the program anywhere near a corner will cause the page to start curling but not actually change the page. This can be done accidentally and once the page is curling you can't use the left/right arrows to move between pages. I find myself constantly clicking on the arrow to go to the next page and nothing happens. After several tries of I start looking around and usually discover a page corner is curling and I have to "manually" flip the page. It's a very annoying feature which I'm sure they paid extra to have but I wish they hadn't.
Another odd change related to page navigation is that the scroll wheel on the mouse no longer lets you move between pages. This was how I primarily used the last DVD so I was a bit annoyed to see it gone.
One change I really liked was the new table of contents selection. Any time you are looking at a magazine it's table of contents becomes accessible from a menu in the top right. This is a great feature.
As with the original MR DVD, a bookmark feature is included. It's located just to the left of the table of contents menu and is accessible from anywhere. Unfortunately, it still names pages stupid things as the original DVD did. They've added a "Rename" feature, assumably because their software names things bad, however so that you can write your own name for the bookmarks.
One thing they fixed is that navigating to a story from either the table of contents or from a bookmark now no longer lands you in the middle of an ad, causing you to have to flip left and right to find the actual article. From what I can tell all of the issues included on this DVD came straight from a digital copy instead of having to be scanned first, so the quality of the pages is consistently high throughout the DVD.
Content-wise things are much like you'd expect. Great Model Railroads tends to favor only a few archetypes of layouts, with narrow gauge popping up on rare occasions. Model Railroad Planning is good, but many of the best articles have already been re-printed elsewhere or bound into the small booklets Kalmbach puts out occasionally.
Having gone through most of the issues on the DVD now, I think the price of $100 is a bit high. Compared to the 75th anniversary DVD it's only a fraction of the content for half the price. $50 to $75 would have been a bit more appropriate.
For all the things quirky about using this DVD it still has the content in an accessible digital form and if you like having a complete, searchable reference it's really your only option. My review probably sounded more bad than good, but I like this DVD overall better than the 75th anniversary, and once you get used to those few quirky bits I mentioned it becomes just fine to use.
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