The Old School Otaku Lounge

The Toei HD 'remaster' aired yesterday, which is in actuality still an upscale. It didn't really look much better than the Viz upscale. Of course it IS marginally better, but that's such a low bar to hurdle.

Someone on the Blu-ray.com forums posted a comparison of the Viz upscale, the Toei upscale, and an older Italian DVD of the show upscaled on a blu-ray player. Surprise surprise, the old Italian DVD still looks better. The worst thing about both the Viz and Toei upscales is the DNR, imo. All traces of grain have been rubbed out, unfortunately leaving the picture quality rather smudgy looking at times.

I wouldn't be surprised if I threw my old Sailor Moon S Pioneer DVDs into my Blu-ray player and they would come out looking better in some cases.

Nitro & I picked up the second part of season 1 and there was a SLIGHT improvement? There's still ghosting present, and grainy-ness, but it didn't look AS messy as the first part....but yeah, not the biggest improvement. :/ It's still better looking than the old ADV DVDs, but that's not necessarily high praise.

I picked up the new Sailor Moon BD re-release of season 1 from Viz. I didn't buy the first release, but I picked this up on the word that this is the Toei upscale and not the Viz 2015 one. So far, so good. DNR is detected by the absence of grain, but the image is very clear and crisp.

Here is a quick comparison between the releases I found

https://twitter.com/fredjfrancis/status ... 1210303488

So if anyone here held out on the 2015 release because of the Viz botched upscale, the new release is "safe" to get.

Yeah, I've heard the new set is an improvement, although it's still not perfect. I'm really tempted to trade in my old set to get it, not gonna lie...

I'd probably hold out for a better one if I had the first Viz release, but with Toei who knows if they will ever do proper HD releases of many of their long running TV shows. For me, I've waited long enough to own the first season on disc and I decided this current release is basically "good enough" to scratch it off my bucket list.