Top: Ronin Entertainment R0 (from Sonny Chiba Action Pack)
Bottom: Optimum R2 UK
Optimum wins quite easily. Ronin is interlaced, too dark, the skin tones don’t look right and it’s cropped. Optimum is progressive and native PAL, but it suffers from some compression artifacts (cap 4) and has more print damage (cap 3).
Both transfers feature indentical Toei first frame damage. In only appears in the first frame of the shot, and of course not in nearly all first frames. Myself I usually don't notice it without freezing the frame. It seems to plague almost all Toei sourced transfer, I've seen it in on Toei dvds, Optimum dvds, HK Video dvds, Panik House dvds...