hontou ni Stripey Insists Sisters Cry Oniichan Now

Full Metal Panic! TSR – From bootleg to blu-ray

My very first copy of FMP! TSR DVD was a bootleg bought in a neighbouring country, bearing official seals assuring the authencity of the product. While mental klaxons had blared with the ridiculously LOW price, (S$15 for 2 discs), I persisted on my folly, naively putting my trust behind those governmental stickers. Turns out, those stickers were the ONLY thing genuine with those DVDs. I had bought fansubs with much worse video quality than those sitting on my hard-disk.

Fast forward a year and the scene is my favourite R3 DVD shop in town. This store sells a interesting mix of legit DVDs and 'sophisticated' bootlegs. 'Sophisticated' because the bootleg DVDs were not your run-of-mill interweb downloads but DVD rips right out of Japanese R2 DVDs. (That creates an interesting scenario of the bootleg R3s having better video quality than most original R1s and some R3s) The store had 2 offerings FMP! TSR - The legit R3 set of 7 discs going for S$280 and an equally legit looking boxset (also 7 discs with the EXACT omake found in the original) going for 1/3 the price. Getting the latter was a no-brainer then. I came to realise later that, that was a R3-rip and I paid the price of piracy with a botched audio track on one of the DVDs.

Yet another year passes and Zyl has by then introduced me to the sweetest site on the anime realm - TheRightStuf. One of my first purchases was FMP! TSR boxset obtained at half the price of my R3 bootlegs though sadly with slightly inferior video quality. My consolation was that I FINALLY owned a legit copy of one of my favourite productions from KyoAni - with NO defective discs.

Another year passes and the tanuki grows restless with his FMP! TSR R1s. It bothered him greatly that bootlegs had better video quality than the real stuff and deep down he also believed that the DVD presentation did not do justice to one of his favourite studio's crowning work. Hope arrived in the form of a Playstation 3 in the household. Seizing a blu-ray offer on TheRightStuf, he bought the FMP! TSR blu-ray boxset and set himself on the path of no return (to DVD).

Alright, I exaggerate. I would DEFINITELY still be buying anime DVDs given the limited listing of anime blu-rays but the FMP! TSR blu ray opened my eyes to video quality that no HD downloads can manage. This is what anime SHOULD. BE. And the exciting thing was it cost as much as my previous R1 boxset! Of course being a SD-upscale, it wasn't the perfect purchase but beautiful enough to wash away the shame/sadness of my previous FMP! TSR purchases.

Have already placed my orders for Claymore blu-ray boxset and can't wait for a US blu-ray version of Kara no Kyoukai.

Picture guide :

A: Fansub bootleg DVDs from neighbouring country - S$15
B: R3-rip (bootleg) DVDs - S$100
C: R1 original DVDs- S$42
D: Region A original blu ray - S$45

Related posts:

1. Original or bootlegged? – 4 classes of anime DVDs
2. Funimation Box sets – True bargains or a discount in quality?
3. The authencity of Suzumiya Haruhi R3s