Commonly used by TMSIDR’s Anime in Blu blog, a first look will be my initial impressions of a set as well as some images to compare.
Today we compare the releases of one show, Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu, on DVD and on Blu-Ray. Not only will this post compare the Japanese DVDs from 2006/2009, but I will also include the North American releases by Bandai Entertainment in 2007/2010 to compare.
As mentioned before, the Blu-Ray Complete Box for Haruhi Suzumiya contains all 28 episodes, one disc of bonus features, the live concert Suzumiya Haruhi no Gekisou, and the classical concert Suzumiya Haruhi no Gensou. The two concerts were not released in North America, and thanks to a question at the New York Anime Festival in 2010, Bandai Entertainment has no plans to release these concerts. Thus they will only have a R2 (Japanese release) equivalent.
After a long prologue, here is what you have been waiting for: comparison images! All images have been taken with Media Player Classic Homecinema x64. Video on DVDs are typically stored as a 700×480 image and then extended by your DVD player to make a 853×480 image. Gekisou was authored quite differently (and stupidly in the opinion of this author) to have the widescreen video with black bars to make a fullscreen image. BD images will be 1920×1280, as stored on the disc. All images are in lossless png format linked from my photobucket account, so allow a little bit of time to load. Click on the thumbnail for a bigger size and lower the bottom bar of the site to be able to click left and right between images.
| Original Japanese Release | Bandai’s Standard Release | Blu-Ray Box |
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Kadokawa’s HD Wallpaper | |
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Kadokawa’s HD Wallpaper | |
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Kadokawa’s HD Wallpaper | |
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Obviously the 2006 episodes have been upscaled by QTEC and while it looks decent, they’ve lost a lot of the sharpness that the DVD had. The 2009 episodes by comparison look a lot sharper, especially around the character lines. Considering the source it could’ve been worse, but the technology has a lot of people that don’t care for it. The 2006 OP/ED have been re-done and look incredibly sharp.
Looking over the discs, it looks as though the only features that were done in HD would be the 2009 episodes and the 2006 OP/ED. All of the bonus features minus the new Taniguchi Goes! skits are upscaled from DVD footage as well. The Gekisou concert looks better, but still is very subpar compared to the rest of the set.
The set has both the original Japanese and the English dub audio as well as the North American version of the English subtitles. The OP/ED don’t have the romanized lyrics, but they aren’t necessary for a Japanese audience.
And so this is all I can say so far. The set is 1080 minutes long and I want to finish most of it before giving one of my full reviews like I do for Railgun. I hope this will hold all of you over until I can justifiably write a full review. It’s Haruhi in decent HD, so it’s not too bad of a set so far.
Also if anyone who ordered this set got a Koizumi/Haruhi shitajiki and would like to trade for Kyon, I would greatly appreciate it.
This entry originally appeared on Cartoon Leap and has been copied faithfully (minus image locations) from the original content. The author has traded for a Koizumi shitajiki already and does not need to trade. The leftmost column of the table that detailed where each image came from had to be removed due to differences in spacing between blogs.
