FUNimation’s Clarine Harp (Director of DVD, Blu-ray and Video Production) and Matt O’Hara (Manager of DVD, Blu-ray and Video Production) were interviewed this week on Anime News Network’s ANNCast, where some new tidbits and discussion regarding the company’s upcoming Blu-ray release of the Dragon Ball Z TV series were dropped.

Also included as a part of the discussion were a series of screen shots comparing the last few releases of the TV series (presented below in a series of three in order as: orange bricks, Dragon Box, upcoming Blu-ray).

Unfortunately, while a pretty good estimation of the quality comparison, all examples were provided as JPGs instead of a lossless format. Never fear, as a crack team of our forum’s international fanboys and fangirls are on the case, with folks across the globe tossing up PNG examples from all of their localized DVD sets.

It is great to see the company take a new approach to remastering the series (with the understanding that, particularly with 16mm film, grain is an inherent part of the image and removing it will also remove detail from the image), but we still have plenty of outstanding questions. What will the Japanese audio source be, and what type of encode can we expect? Since it is a film source, will the title cards remain in their original Japanese? How about the recaps, previews, and eyecatches? Stay tuned as we keep tabs on this new remastering as we head toward Level 1.1‘s release in North America on 08 November 2011.