Can anyone tell me how the HK DVDs of US films compare with their US counterparts?
I noticed that DDDHouse has films like Family Man, One Night at McCools & Memento up for sale at good prices but I'm worried about burnt-in Chinese subs and picture quality.
Can anyone comment on this?

Thanks,
Cyberdemon

in regards to Family Man, this is 4:3 letter boxed (as in not anamorphic)
One Night at McCools & Memento on the other hand are both fullscreen (4:3 transfers from what I can gather). Coming from Mei Ah, I doubt they'll be any good. Although they don't have burnt in subtitles, but are region 3 coded.
If you will, take it that prices are respective of the quality with most Hong Kong DVDs (most, but not all thankfully).

Thanks yangshouwen.
I thought the prices were too good to be true - guess I was right!
Oh well, they've got enough HK flicks to keep me purchasing for quite a while.

Cyberdemon

One Night at McCools is I think a Universe release.

Actually... some 'cheap' R3 released DVDs are quite good. For example, the 'Driven' DVD has a DTS track, and quite a good transfer.

I think as a general rule, don't go for any Mei Ah releases, where Universe releases are quite good value. Other examples of Universe releases are The Contender and Lost Souls. For the low low price you are sacrificing anamorphic widescreen (but still letterboxed), English subtitles (Chinese subtitles only but not burnt in), and special features.

The 'full priced' R3 discs are usually exactly the same as the R1 release, except with additional subtitles. Example: Star Wars I, Valentine, etc.

do any of the R3 so-called Western movies have a Chinese dub track on it? You would think that given the number of times I've been in HK I would know this answer but I never looked for Western DVDs before.

Looking at places such as http://www.dvdshelf.com and http://www.coolashop.com on the HK versions... apart from family and animated films, generally films are not dubbed into cantonese or mandarin (well that's what I gather).

The family and animated film rule-of-thumb is true. Though note that sometimes there are odd pictures that were shown in HK as a repackaged film to suit the market better, and for these films only the dubbed versions (usually with voice of stars) are released in cinemas.

Some examples include 'Iron Ladies', which was a big hit in the HK, and recently a Korean film about dogs (?)...

In these cases, usually both the original and dubbed tracks will be included on the VCD/DVD.

I think it would be very rare to find a Western film that has no English tracks.