This has just got to stop. There should be no reason why, when Crunchyroll simulcasted Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt in 720p, it looked better than Funimation’s recent Blu-ray release of the series, which is (supposedly) in 1080p.
I’m not the only person who thinks that the Blu-ray video quality is absolute crap. There’s no excuse for this. I waited for, and paid extra for, a Blu-ray that looks no better than a DVD. This isn’t their first time screwing up a Blu-ray release, and I doubt it’ll be their last.
Of course, if someone has screencaps of the JP release, please share them. It’s possible that Funimation just got shitty masters from Kadokawa. But I’m going to assume that’s not the case, given their track record with Blu-rays.
I have seen the screen caps from the Japanese BD release and it wasn’t very good looking . The Serial Experiments Lain BD looked fine, people just made a shit storm out of that for a little reason.
I’m not entirely sure why they would accept ‘shitty masters’?
SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN has moderate-to-severe banding problems, and they slap you with some of the worst of it in the first 5 minutes of the show. The JP release does not have these problems. FUNi’s release is a step down, period.
PANTY & STOCKING, however, looks like crap even on the JP BD release. If the CR 720p streams looked better, it was only because they processed the source to eliminate the grain and aliasing that was always a part of the masters. FUNi’s release looks no worse than the original materials, and while you’re right – it IS ugly – it’s only ugly because P&S was never a looker.