Thanks for making all those screenshots TheGreatness25!
I still maintain my opinion, that as far as colors are concerned, I like the 30th anni set best and I'm thankful to own it. The Level sets leave the show looking like the 90s cartoon it deserves to look like, but until we get Funimation to finish what they started back then, the 30th Anni set is (in my opinion) the best thing we can get currently.
The Season set (16:9) looks just as terrible as what limited chance I gave it back when it first came out (and I nearly immediately resold season 1 after getting it). It actually looks worse than the orange bricks in most of these shots. The contrast is way too high, and even though the orange bricks are blurry in areas the season sets aren't, the high contrast of the season set kills the appearance to me. By keeping the 30th anni set 4:3, the amount of detail getting blown out by DNR isn't as great, so the end result looks a lot better. They also reduced the contrast and saturation for the 30th anni set.
I decided to make some 99% (because I am having to eyeball this in Photoshop using difference layers) identical scaled and cropped-to-the-smallest-edge versions of the most important versions (as I see it), and I was surprised to discover that the Funimation Dragon Box (which has more art on the left and right than the Japanese version) is actually more cropped on the left and right in this scene than the Level set or 30th anni (which were pretty much cropped identically). Since some might want to nitpick, I did the math. The Funimation Dragon Box is missing 1.48% on the left and right compared to the 30th anni and the Level Set in this scene. How much is that REALLY though? Well, it's enough that if 1.48% were missing from just the right side, Vegeta would be missing almost an entire segment of his shoulder armor.
And for reference, the Funimation Dragon Box is actually LESS cropped than the Japanese one on the left and right, but slightly MORE cropped on the height [at least in this scene, I'm not checking multiple ones]. The Funimation version has 7 more pixels on the left and 6 pixels more on the right. While the Japanese version has 5 pixels more on the bottom (technically 4 pixels if you respect that Funimation's has an extra pixel at the top). Said another way, the Japanese Dragon Box is missing 1.8% of the width while it has 0.9% more height. So you actually see a slightly greater amount of art on the Funimation version. Minor stuff, but when we're talking about 720x540 here, it's a little notable if you're looking for the biggest picture possible.
There's also some interesting distortion to both versions of the Dragon Box on this scene. The bottom left corner of the footage has been pulled outward and the same can be said for the top right corner, resulting in a noticeable twist. You can notice it if you look at what I made. I aligned the scene to Vegeta's shoulder, and you'll note Goku is a bit lower than the other versions and the mountain behind him is distorted.
Anyway, here's my "all things being equal" crop and comparison of what I consider the most important versions of the show. It would take too much time to put every single version on this.
It's worth noting that the blu-ray versions are substantially higher resolution than the DVD versions, so all of the blu-ray versions are scaled down to fit what I created. If you have a monitor or TV larger than these images appear right now (on whatever you're looking at these pics on right now)...(and unless you're using a computer from 1995 or looking at this on your phone... you do have a monitor or TV larger than this) then you are going to be seeing blown up versions of this art on your monitor/tv. If you think something looks blurry at this size, it's going to look a lot more blurry at a larger size.
The versions of the show I compared using TheGreatness25's screenshots are:
Japanese Dragon Box DVD in 4:3 ratio
Funimation's Dragon Box DVD in 4:3 ratio
Funimation's "Orange Brick" season set DVD in 16:9 ratio
Funimation's Season Set Blu-Ray in 16:9 ratio
Funimation's 30th Anniversary Blu-Ray in 4:3 ratio
Funimation's Level Set Blu-Ray in 4:3 ratio*
*this set was canceled after only 2 volumes were released in 2011
There's two ways to look at what I've created. On Facebook you can flip through each individual screenshot, but Facebook will have compressed each image.
https://www.facebook.com/dbf.official/p ... 2028673676
Or you can see them all lined up vertically below with very little (if any) additional compression.