Another late review…
1. Packaging, goodies. After this volume, I have officially collected the first half of the show, in a sturdy chip-board Blu-ray Box. It is the second BD-BOX in my collection, first being Spiderman Trilogy, but that one unfortunately came with a flimsy paper box. show/hide With all the first press goodies: The box is a little better in construction and well carefully glued than R1 anime DVD-BOXes I have. But since I paid a heck of lot money in it, I would really expect this… Vol.5 include episodes 11 to 13. The story continues to weaken, episode 11 is somewhat interesting with the one choice Alto has to make on his birthday; episode 12 starts with a very Do You Remember Love way (Zentradi commanders have semi-resemblance to the original Britai (Vrlitwhai), Exsedol, and Kamjin), then quickly switches to Macross 7 way especially that sound pods mounted on VF… episode 13 has a very misleading title – Memorial Global which makes everyone think that Captain Global will return and somehow we’ll see Hikaru or Misa… Back to packaging of this volume, the jacket picture has Ranka and Brera on the front, Macross Global and VF-27 on the background, which pretty much gives what happens in these three episodes: Disc label: The booklet focuses on two parts this time, first part is the character designs of Alto’s family, second is the Vajra. There are more backgrounds than usual in this booklet: Other stuff are the same as previous volumes, it add one pamphlet of Macross related ads (8 total), Blu-ray disc operation menu, and a Bandai online membership voucher. The Bandai ads have some Blu-ray releases, include Zeta Gundam, Eureka SeveN, and Akira. 2. Spec, Video Quality, Audio Quality, screenshot comparisons... Here is the spec: Video Codec: mpeg4 AVC Resolution: 1080p Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Audio Japanese: LPCM 2.0 Audio Commentary Japanese: LPCM 2.0 Disc BD 25 Bandai/honneamise manages put 4 episodes (acutal content is 3 episodes, but the way of authoring the disc is that they duplicate the video of episode 4, and put the audio commentary on that one, so it counts as four episodes of space) But anyway, the video bitrate doesn't drop because of that. It still got a beautiful full 40Mbps full bitrate transfer. 2.1 The Video: A- The videos this time remain the same quality. There’s not much actions in episode 11, but episode 12 and 13 make that up with some interesting and quality dog fighting. 2.2 The Audio: B+ The audio is again clean and clear, that's all I can say. It has not too much dynamic range. There's very little if not at all channel separation/directionality are present... LPCM 2.0 seems to be standard nowadays, but for this series, 2.0 is really limiting the Blu-ray capability... Episode 12 is pretty much advertisement for Ranka’s Single, they managed to throw all her songs in it… 2.3 The Menus and Subtitles: B Same as the Vol.2, Vol.3 and Vol.4, the menu of this release includes both non pop-up, DVD style always-on menu. Menus are static with no background music; as well as Blu-rays pop-up menu. The pop-up menu is missing the music chapters, the only way you can access the music chapters is thru the always-on menu, which defeats the convenience of what Blu-ray offers. The menu is simple and effective (Not so for the pop-up menu!), navigation is easy and intuitive. But again I would prefer a more Macross related theme... And again, there's NO subtitles. 2.4 The extras: B Audio Commentary (haven't listened yet..) Other extras (ads) . Bandai related ads . It's not an extra feature rich disc, but there's a 16 page booklet, I'd rather prefer to have an actual print-out of the "extras". 3. Content: needs more work Final thoughts: add later. Lastly, booklet scans: JPEG version: Uncompressed TIFF version (5 parts): See You Next Deculture 
No comments:
Post a Comment