Set 2 should be out soon.
So I wonder if Viz learnt their lesson, or if the Blurays are still messed up? Anyone willing to take one for the team?
The Blu-rays will likely always be what they are. Standard definition 480i, deinterlaced (probably badly), blown up to 1080p, colors tweaked up to eleven, with a light amount of vaseline smeared over the picture so that nobody can see the flaws in the upscale (or the fine details that became visible in the Japanese remaster). That's pretty much standard procedure for foolishly making a Blu-ray when you don't have a high definition source.
The set 2 DVDs were being worked on when the set 1 DVDs released (and the poop really hit the fan), and Viz swore up-and-down that "their process" (making the DVDs by downsampling their flawed Fake-rays) was
not the source of the problems (all evidence to the contrary), and insisted that the studio would continue doing this all the way through SailorStars, and that their process would not change (although the magic process which they use to transform the shitty stick-man drawings on cocktail napkins which Toei provided into works of art that almost resemble overfiltered versions of the Japanese remasters, is a labor-intensive process, hand-tuned for each episode, and might change, although change is definitely not needed, and we must insist that Viz's magic Blu-rays are superior to the Japanese remaster).
Even if Viz realized that they're supposed to straight-copy the SD materials, not filter them back-and-forth, their studio had certainly already screwed up some of set 2 before they learned that. And I have zero faith that they sent the studio back to fix whatever episodes they messed up. They will definitely print set 2 with some of the episodes using their flawed process, assuming they fix their process
at all (and according to them, they won't).
They
might have fixed the letterboxing issue for set 2, since they admitted that one was a problem. Or maybe it'll take set 3 before that gets fixed.
Now that Madman has come out and said that Viz's DVDs are messed up and their Blu-rays were a bad idea, that might put another level of pressure on Viz to get this crap sorted out before they release
five seasons worth of flawed product, but sadly I expect Viz to stick to their guns on this. Viz seems to believe that they're right, or more cynically, Fake-rays are the best
business plan when it comes to milking as much money as you can from millions of nostalgia-driven casual sheep.
