[JP] Kamichu!

[muhootsaver]

http://forest.kinokuniya.co.jp/ItemIntro/623527

06/02. 26,250yen.

[TheGreenMan]

Finally. I remember this was one of the first shows to animated in HD.

[hissatsu]

I suppose I should be grateful that my JP BD pre-orders from April onwards are very light - only Eva, Sora no Woto, and Katanagatari so far - and the latter 2 are still dependent on how well those series develop. They could well get canceled like my Railgun pre-orders were. Anyhow, Kamichu! is a sure pick up.

[hissatsu]

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know for certain if Kamichu! was animated in HD? The one review on the amazon.co.jp listing claims it'll be an SD upscale, but he appears to have just assumed that because of when it was made. There are older HD digitally animated shows (GitS SAC, 12 Kingdoms, My-HIME). Anyone absolutely certain? I'm not too interested in buying if it's an upconvert because the R1 Geneons are pretty much equal to the R2s.

[Pyocola]

I don't think it ever aired in HD, though I have seen it on lists of known HD anime. I guess we'll see.

[prnoct90]

Geneon has yet to ever release an upscale. I would be shocked if this release is one.

[Buster Darkwings]

Geneon has yet to ever release an upscale. I would be shocked if this release is one.

This is actually an Aniplex release. And Geneon certainly have released upscales, both Mahoromatic TV series were upscales, even though the first one was cel-animated and should have received a new film transfer.

[hissatsu]

Well, from the pics muhoot linked on his blog, this is an upscale. Ughh. The R1 Geneon release already looked quite good. I can't cancel this order as it's already about to ship from amazon.co.jp. Look's like I'll be selling it or returning it. This is really disappointing.

Edit: And aside from the EE, it looks like DNR as well

Compare the first 3 pics linked at http://muhootsaver.tistory.com/942

(DVD screenshots bicubic resized to 1920x1080)

Kamichu R1 screenshot 1 (http://acacallis.com/kamichu_r1dvd_01.png)
Kamichu R1 screenshot 2 (http://acacallis.com/kamichu_r1dvd_02.png)
Kamichu R1 screenshot 3 (http://acacallis.com/kamichu_r1dvd_03.png)

The BD screenshots may be jpegs, but at that level of compression I can't get the digital grain to just almost completely disappear like that.

Definitely going back to Amazon.

[Pyocola]

Definitely not a great upscale. The ringing is pretty annoying in some of these shots.

As for the digital grain, I'm not really sure what happened, because I recall seeing comparisons to the R2 DVD and it was a lot cleaner than the R1 as well. A lot of the noise around the hair/bangs seems to be genuine compression artifacts too.

[hissatsu]

Definitely not a great upscale. The ringing is pretty annoying in some of these shots.

As for the digital grain, I'm not really sure what happened, because I recall seeing comparisons to the R2 DVD and it was a lot cleaner than the R1 as well. A lot of the noise around the hair/bangs seems to be genuine compression artifacts too.

The stuff around the hair is definite compression artifacts. All the "grain" in the backgrounds doesn't look like any mpeg artifacts I've ever seen. Anyone have the R2 DVDs to post a comparison?

[Asf]

To be honest, the compression artifacts on those DVD shots bug me more than anything in the BD screen caps.