Regarding the releases of the original "Dragon Ball" TV adaptation - particularly the "Dragon Box"?

[huzaifa_ahmed]

Seeing that there is still the footage and the Dragon Box Z material (as well as others such as the "Level" sets), it might be worth detailing the Dragon Ball first series home releases, and their qualities.

The Dragon Ball Wiki details a "Dragon Box" predating the Z releases. In truth, of course, the "Dragon Box Z" releases are only so highly regarded because of their time of release and in comparison to the extremely low bar that had been set up by, of course Toei, but also many levels beyond that by FUNimation..

The colors are still quite off, there is plenty missing detail, and of course it's rather low-resolution (perhaps acceptable for the 2003 era of the Japanese release, but disappointing by the English adaptation of these releases many years later). & this is brought to consideration when looking at the Japanese context of the Dragon Box sets (as simply "the home release of Dragon Ball" and a modestly competent Toei release), rather than the American context, which at the time was releases either heavily edited either in visuals or story content, or incomplete (so much for "uncut release", amirite? )

So, on the releases of "Dragon Ball", how do they stack up, including their "Dragon Box" releases (on which, even on this site, seems to be quite silent a discussion)?

[Zestanor]

They look nicer than the old DB doubles sets in motion, and they look better than the blue bricks in colors and texture. It seems that funimation has never gotten film masters for DB. They’ve been using the same digital standard def tapes since the beginning. This transfer looks passable, and the colors are arguably better than the Dragon Boxes. It was sent to Cartoon Network and laid to the old DVDs without any attempts to touch it up, but for the blue bricks they cropped it a bit and applied noise reduction.

Honestly, if they had released the blue bricks just as more efficiently encoded versions of the old DVDs, no cropping, no noise reduction, they would be a fine competitor to the Dragon Box. But no one’s really complained about American releases of Dragon Ball, since they have always been uncut, included the original audio, and had a dub with the Kiluchi score.

[huzaifa_ahmed]

They look nicer than the old DB doubles sets in motion, and they look better than the blue bricks in colors and texture. It seems that funimation has never gotten film masters for DB. They’ve been using the same digital standard def tapes since the beginning. This transfer looks passable, and the colors are arguably better than the Dragon Boxes. It was sent to Cartoon Network and laid to the old DVDs without any attempts to touch it up, but for the blue bricks they cropped it a bit and applied noise reduction.

Honestly, if they had released the blue bricks just as more efficiently encoded versions of the old DVDs, no cropping, no noise reduction, they would be a fine competitor to the Dragon Box. But no one’s really complained about American releases of Dragon Ball, since they have always been uncut, included the original audio, and had a dub with the Kiluchi score.

So, are these American DVD's, or the Japanese "Dragon Box" DVD's referred to earlier? & if so, what's their availability?

[Zestanor]

The American DVDs.

Specifically the ‘Sagas’ release.

They’re available used on the internet. Like other early DVDs, they are poorly encoded and so they don’t look very good in motion.

Edit: The website says these DVDs don’t use dual layer, which means that they have half the bit-rate of the season sets, which have the same number of episodes per disc.

[Captain Awesome]

The Dragon Ball Dragon Box release is similar, if slightly inferior to the Dragon Box Z release.

The image quality as you would expect due to the age of the masters involved is slightly worse and there are some pretty bad frame alignment issues in some episodes (during the RR arc). Overall it is much better than anything FUNimation has released (if only for its bit-rate and progressive encode) but is far from perfect.