Originally Posted by
Alzarius
Got it today! Shipped pretty quickly, considering it came all the way from Hong Kong to me in San Francisco (took about 7-8 days). Popped it into my Playstation 3 and did a quick evaluation of it on my 46" Samsung LED-TV.
It's packaged in a standard multi-disc case that (not like the first batch of releases that came also with a sturdy box that wrapped around the DVD case).
There are 8 DVD-9s, so 5 episodes per DVD. The bitrate (I used my Playstation3, and that shows the bitrate) seems pretty good, varying between 4-7Mbps depending on the scene. The picture quality is quite clean and vibrant for a 1984 series, and the sound quality is sufficient too. Basically, it LOOKS like DVD quality for an old series (not a shoddy, pixelated transfer, but it does understandably have some slight grain and small discolorations from time to time).... I think it looks great quality-wise, and is probably as good as we're going to get for this.
The bad: yes, it's not a perfect release. My main gripe is the beginning title song sequence, and the end-of-episode credits and song are edited out from MOST of the episodes. On each DVD, the first episode has the title song sequence included, and the last episode has the end credits included, but all the other episodes in between have them eliminated, and those episodes just fade into each other. It's kind of knit-picking I guess, but I'm a completist and I like to have the WHOLE thing untouched, with all the songs and titles included. As it is for this set, you get the beginning titles only for episodes 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 26, 31, 36, and you get the end credits and sub-theme song only for episodes 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40. I hope that made sense. Kind of pisses me off that I don't get to hear Roman and Lisa's sub-theme songs more often at the end of each episode. Essentially, each DVD's structure is each episode is a Chapter (5 chapters total), and those 5 chapters / episodes is one continuous Title (around 3h15-20min). As far as I can tell, other than the beginning song and end credits, each episode is uncut.
Overall, I think this is a decent, and probably pretty good release. For me, it's not completely satisfying because of what I mentioned in the above paragraph. But if you're looking to just watch this series in decent quality without any editing that changes the story, this would be the set to pick up.