Dragon Ball Z - Season 9, Does It Look Better on DVD or Blu-ray?

[JohnnyCashKami]

I've only ever seen the DVD version and gotta say, even though it's cropped it still looked really good but never enjoyed it to the fullest because chopping off the top and bottom parts of the screen were and are a huge deal-breaker for me since it's not how DBZ series were made intended to be seen as. Still, how does Season 9 on DVD vs BD compare? Reckon that it's more of the same on Blu-ray but with a touch of water-paint to it?

The DVD version (at least R1) has the advantage that it features the original Japanese title episode and the physical booklet (original run, not with new prints) and the paper packaging in itself is kinda cool too.

[Robo4900]

Not to be smarmy, but both are crap. If you're in a position where you're going to get one of the two, I guess just go for whichever is cheaper and more convenient; they're both utterly terrible for various reasons, and neither is really worth your dollar.

And it's not about the cropping, necessarily. That is a cardinal sin, but it's far from the extent of the troubles of these two masters; the DVD suffers from heavy blurriness, the BDs suffer from destruction of background art, oversharpening, wobbly shading and linework due to the degraining methods used, both suffer from massive destruction of detail(Both are generally lower-detail than the Dragon Boxes and the original DVD singles), and if you're a dub-viewer all the audio problems from Funi's "Remastered" dub, including the mixing errors, the badly-inserted redub dialogue, the missing SFX, the incorrect Faulconer music placements, some missing SFX, a couple of missing lines...

Just go with whichever is cheaper/more convenient to you -- they're both god-awful for slightly different reasons, and really, you'll never get a real consensus on which of them is less bad, just a bunch of conflicting advice on which of the two absolute worst releases of the show to settle for.

[JohnnyCashKami]

Not to be smarmy, but both are crap. If you're in a position where you're going to get one of the two, I guess just go for whichever is cheaper and more convenient; they're both utterly terrible for various reasons, and neither is really worth your dollar.

And it's not about the cropping, necessarily. That is a cardinal sin, but it's far from the extent of the troubles of these two masters; the DVD suffers from heavy blurriness, the BDs suffer from destruction of background art, oversharpening, wobbly shading and linework due to the degraining methods used, both suffer from massive destruction of detail(Both are generally lower-detail than the Dragon Boxes and the original DVD singles), and if you're a dub-viewer all the audio problems from Funi's "Remastered" dub, including the mixing errors, the badly-inserted redub dialogue, the missing SFX, the incorrect Faulconer music placements, some missing SFX, a couple of missing lines...

Just go with whichever is cheaper/more convenient to you -- they're both god-awful for slightly different reasons, and really, you'll never get a real consensus on which of them is less bad, just a bunch of conflicting advice on which of the two absolute worst releases of the show to settle for.

I own the Dragon Box Z (don't have them around currently) but was considering on getting Season 9 as a means to watch episodes of the Majin Boo arc although ended up giving up, the cropping would have annoyed me.

[DHM211]

Neither are good but the orange brick dvd of season 9 is slightly better imo. It has some grain, film like detail, and if you slightly tone down the saturation, better colors.

The only thing the blu-ray has over the orange brick is that Funimation removed dirt and scratches, which are quite prevalent on the orange bricks.

[Robo4900]

I own the Dragon Box Z (don't have them around currently) but was considering on getting Season 9 as a means to watch episodes of the Majin Boo arc although ended up giving up, the cropping would have annoyed me.

Well, if you own the DBoxes, my suggestion would just be to pirate a copy of the discs you want to watch, if you don't have access to your physical copies. If you already own them, there's no real moral qualms to be had there, I'd say... Not really much different than making a backup of your own discs, really.

[uzuni]

From a purely visual standpoint:

Dragon Box>Single>Orange Brick>Blu-ray.

I firmly stand by my opinion that the Blu-rays were butchered beyond repair.

[JohnnyCashKami]

From a purely visual standpoint:

Dragon Box>Single>Orange Brick>Blu-ray.

I firmly stand by my opinion that the Blu-rays were butchered beyond repair.

That's my opinion too.

If we'd have gotten the Levels all the way from the start to the finish, the Dragon Boxes wouldn't even be that important as they are. I can't even imagine how amazing Freeza, Cell and Majin Boo's arcs would have looked like in high definition, even with the insane amount of grain they had.

FUNi did give DB Movies 1-4 a Level treatment so they're not always in favor of releasing shitty Dragon Ball products, but it's rare when they actually do something right.

[thomas1up]

From a purely visual standpoint:

Dragon Box>Single>Orange Brick>Blu-ray.

I firmly stand by my opinion that the Blu-rays were butchered beyond repair.

That's my opinion too.

If we'd have gotten the Levels all the way from the start to the finish, the Dragon Boxes wouldn't even be that important as they are. I can't even imagine how amazing Freeza, Cell and Majin Boo's arcs would have looked like in high definition, even with the insane amount of grain they had.

FUNi did give DB Movies 1-4 a Level treatment so they're not always in favor of releasing shitty Dragon Ball products, but it's rare when they actually do something right.

The Level sets did have their fair share of issues, namely the crushed blacks, the inferior masters they had, as well as missing NEPs which would still give the Dragon Boxes some merit. Still they were very competent releases and serve a great example of a home video release that FUNimation should be putting out rather than their cropped, watercolour mess of a bluray they later released.

[uzuni]

All in all, a 1080p Dragon Box transfer would be the dream. I can only imagine how the original three series would look with such a restoration.

[TheGreatness25]

Well, you could be the judge. I used MPC because I've been told once or twice on here that it retains the original colors more than other programs. I also shrunk the Blu-ray to match-up to the DVD to do a side-by-side comparison. I included all original sizes in the "spoiler" below. I also threw in a comparison with Kai just in case anyone was curious about that.

The order is orange brick DVD to the left and Blu-ray to the right. The ones with Kai have Kai all the way to the right.

Spoiler:

[LordCrumb]

^ Blu-Rays look pretty good to me.

The Blu-Rays did look the better in the later seasons (first season gave me a headache), with Season 9 being the best of the bunch. The Boo saga had some of the finest animation of DBZ imo.

[Robo4900]

^ Blu-Rays look pretty good to me.

The Blu-Rays did look the better in the later seasons (first season gave me a headache), with Season 9 being the best of the bunch. The Boo saga had some of the finest animation of DBZ imo.

Yes, you're right -- the 1920x1080 Blu-Ray footage when resized to 720x405 pixels tall, less than a quarter of its full size, doesn't look too bad at a glance, with only the infamous orange bricks to compare them to.

Though, even at this vastly reduced size, and only compared to the brick DVDs, the crap of the BDs is still pretty evident at times. Just look at the clouds in this shot. DVD looks okay overall, BD looks really incompetently filtered, with the edges of the clouds becoming very hard and defined, and the actual clouds themselves looking quite solid despite the fact they're clouds, and very clearly supposed to have much more soft, feathered edges, and subtle changes in tone like we see on the DVD...


Backgrounds are far and away the biggest problem in the BDs.
The real problems arise when you get the more detailed painted backgrounds, which is quite evident here. Look at the way the texture of the paintings has been totally destroyed in the BD. Despite its blurriness, at least the DVD still retains the texture and subtlety of the original drawings. On the BD, the grass has lost the variation in tone, the earth has gone the other way, with its subtle changes in tone being turned into blocks of strongly-contrasting pieces almost like someone's run the Photoshop mosaic filter or something, particularly in the ground next to Goku's feet. And all the little squiggly dark lines on the grass have been sharpened heavily too... The whole thing almost looks like a cheap Flash cartoon more than it looks like celluloid on painted backgrounds... Look at how ugly the BD makes that tree look...!


Honestly, even if you like the look of the BDs -- or, indeed, the orange brick DVDs -- you can't say it's a good remaster, not even remotely; even if you like the end result, it's destroyed what the original picture was. It's rather like Funi's dubbing; yes, you're perfectly within your rights to like it, but surely you can understand why people get frustrated that it destroys most of the subtlety and character of the original.

[TheGreatness25]

To be fair, I did include the original size of the screenshot as well. I only reduced the size to help make an apples to apples comparison.

I'm assuming that they never altered the Kai footage from the Japanese release, so let's size it up against Toei's own Blu-ray remaster. My god, I think that Kai the final chapters is hideous. It all looks yellow and green.

I personally never saw the problem with the Blu-rays. The cropping is the worst offender in these, but that case is kind of moot since Kai ended up doing it too. Obviously chopping off the top and bottom of the image is bad, but whatever. I find the Blu-ray colors and smoothness to be pretty good. I don't see the problem with them, but then again, I'm not really looking. I never really analyzed it -- I just go by the feeling I get when I see it.

To backtrack to your earlier point, I can put up Dragon Box footage right alongside those, but I feel that I'd have to resize the Blu-ray still. When we're looking at these things on a TV or computer, we don't watch them in those sizes, we watch them at the same size. And shrinking down the relatively giant Blu-ray is much more plausible than blowing up the 720x405 to 1080 sizes. Because, like I've said, we don't watch the series through properly sized screenshots, we watch it with the same size on TV or the computer or a phone or whatever, with the sizes automatically adjusted. It's not fair to sit there and point out flaws in the giant picture that has a lot more detail than the small picture that condenses that same detail.

[Robo4900]

To be fair, I did include the original size of the screenshot as well. I only reduced the size to help make an apples to apples comparison.

Hah. You'll have to forgive me, I seem to have missed that.

I'm assuming that they never altered the Kai footage from the Japanese release, so let's size it up against Toei's own Blu-ray remaster. My god, I think that Kai the final chapters is hideous. It all looks yellow and green.

Yeah, TFC is pretty ugly honestly.

I personally never saw the problem with the Blu-rays. The cropping is the worst offender in these, but that case is kind of moot since Kai ended up doing it too. Obviously chopping off the top and bottom of the image is bad, but whatever. I find the Blu-ray colors and smoothness to be pretty good. I don't see the problem with them, but then again, I'm not really looking. I never really analyzed it -- I just go by the feeling I get when I see it.

Well, the two biggest problems are that it's blurred so much the detail level is approximately the same as that of the original Funi DVD singles, and the second is that they compensated for this by digitally sharpening it so hard, that combined with the blurring, it destroys all the texture of the image.

To backtrack to your earlier point, I can put up Dragon Box footage right alongside those, but I feel that I'd have to resize the Blu-ray still. When we're looking at these things on a TV or computer, we don't watch them in those sizes, we watch them at the same size. And shrinking down the relatively giant Blu-ray is much more plausible than blowing up the 720x405 to 1080 sizes. Because, like I've said, we don't watch the series through properly sized screenshots, we watch it with the same size on TV or the computer or a phone or whatever, with the sizes automatically adjusted. It's not fair to sit there and point out flaws in the giant picture that has a lot more detail than the small picture that condenses that same detail.

Really though, while we are likely to see DBoxes, the Funi BDs, Kai, etc. at the same size when actually watching, chances are that actual size will be HD rather than SD, so arguably downscaling the HD masters to SD size just makes them look better than they really would, so... Perhaps upscaling SD content is more fair...

Thing is, though, the BDs are supposed to be a HD master, the DVDs -- including the DBoxes -- are supposed to be SD masters. So, while they should be side-by-side compared at approximately the same size so we can see them lined up exactly, the HD masters should be judged as HD masters.
Kai 1.0 downscaled to DVD resolution would come out on top in basically any comparison, but at HD size, it becomes clear Kai 1.0's degraining was so strong, it's just really soft... There's just not much detail there, often less detail than on the DBoxes... So, as a HD master it falls down.

So you see, HD masters should be judged as HD masters.

... And yet, even judged based on a 405px high image, the Funi BDs still look like crap. So even if it was an SD master it would suck... So it definitely fails as a HD master.

[TheGreatness25]

Just for you, I'll blow up the DVD images when I get the chance lol Even when doing that little side-by-side, when I'd zoom in, they'd look so pixelated. I get your point though. Again, I never really went looking for the issues. I just kind of judge them as I see them as a whole. The most notable difference is the colors, which I actually like.

EDIT

Just for fun, I did it.

Spoiler:

[uzuni]

Just for you, I'll blow up the DVD images when I get the chance lol Even when doing that little side-by-side, when I'd zoom in, they'd look so pixelated. I get your point though. Again, I never really went looking for the issues. I just kind of judge them as I see them as a whole. The most notable difference is the colors, which I actually like.

EDIT

Just for fun, I did it.

Spoiler:

Those look atrocious.

[TheGreatness25]

I think they look fine. I think that in some inexplicable way, Funimation did a better job on the Boo arc Blu-ray remaster than Toei did (Kai). Like a lot better. Like I popped in the Final Chapters Blu-ray for the first time and it hit me just how bad it looked out the gate without me even analyzing it, better.

[KBABZ]

I think they look fine. I think that in some inexplicable way, Funimation did a better job on the Boo arc Blu-ray remaster than Toei did (Kai). Like a lot better. Like I popped in the Final Chapters Blu-ray for the first time and it hit me just how bad it looked out the gate without me even analyzing it, better.

I think this image really sums it up. The washed-out look removes a LOT of the detail from the grass in the background painting, as well as many details of the couches. Not to mention the better white balancing, which in TFC is somehow both green and warm.

[TheGreatness25]

I know that it has problems when looking through it and analyzing, but all I'm saying is that the colors and smoothness make them pleasant to look at. I personally would never notice its flaws without a side-by-side comparison. So to me it looks good as a stand alone (unlike Kai).

But anyway, what do you think looks better between the orange brick and Blu-ray? I know the orange bricks' colors were a hot topic of discussion back in the day.