> Hmm not sure about bandai. I dont
> think i've bought anything from them in a while. Are
> Funimations DVD releases usually quite poor? Some of their
> newer stuff that ive looked at looks pretty piss poor. I.e.
> the US claymore DVD release was NOTICABLY 
> inferior looking to the R2 DVD rips that i had. Thank god i
> rented it and didn't buy it 

Quality on Funimation is kind of Hit-and-Miss.  Some projects they do great, others,
it's total crap.  I usually pay more attention to the jobs they do with translating
and sometimes the voice-acting.  Unfortunately a lot of the VA jobs have recently

sucked big time, but that's not just limited to Funi.  I've recently stopped watching
dubs entirely... which has been backed up with the almost "nails-across-blackboard"
awfulness of everything that autostarts in the DVD player in English (I have mine

set to JP audio, EN subs, but these idiots force it into English audio, anyway).

> R1 DVDs usually tend to look worse than R2 for some reason,
> i dont know why. But Claymore seemed like a pretty big
> difference

Well, in the US, advertising (even in-house) takes precedence to the actual product,
as does the copy-protection.  So, often a japanese ep will have 1.75GB dedicated to
an ep, while companies here only use 1.25GB.  Of course, laziness and incompetence

in setting up the encode can also result in bad looking video.  In recent years, it
has actually been quite apparent that the R2 version of a show is usually better than
the R1, and this isn't limited to just anime... Several older British TV series'
have been doing this, as well, where the UK version looks incredibly better than the
US released version.

Thank the lord for computers and digital monitors, which make the image better, and
don't care about regions or PAL vs NTSC issues (and FairMount, so I don't have to
buy a second DVD and set it to region-2).