Bullets 'n' Babes

Both BDs are 1080i due to the mix of framerates used (drawn cels scanned to film, and CGI)
Episode 2 of the UK BD has several glitch frames (distributor will fix this), there is also some mislabelling
UK BD is typically 17-19Mbp/s, Japanese BD 34-38Mbp/s

https://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/dvd/cowboy.bebop/1.bdj.png
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https://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/dvd/cowboy.bebop/2.bdj.png
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https://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/dvd/cowboy.bebop/3.bdj.png
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https://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/dvd/cowboy.bebop/4.bdj.png
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https://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/dvd/cowboy.bebop/5.bdj.png
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https://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/dvd/cowboy.bebop/6.bdj.png
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Christ that's an absurd bitrate on the UK discs! Luckily the screenshots don't seem to bad compression-wise. Have you had a chance to watch any eps properly Lourdes?
It's also yet another UK BD that for some unknown reason is slightly brighter than its Japanese counterpart. I always wonder if they do this to eliminate any brightness flickering in the original masters?

The crazy bitrate on the Japanese BD isn't needed, but the UK release could have used some more and none of this brightening. Ends up a little soft and in some shots (e.g second one) there's quite a difference in the amount of grain. There's no flickering in the master, it's just weird - the R1 DVDs were brighter too.

I probably should have included some shots of CGI bits. Bebop is a mix of traditional animation and a little CGI for a *few* space bits, thus some shots are upscaled entirely, and others seem to have been reconstructed from the original assets so you have upscaled CGI on top of HD film. This is as good as we'll get, Sunrise did a great job when they made this master a few years back.

Yeah 38Mbps peak is very high when you think about it and yet there's still compression noise in some of the Jpn shots so I guess the compression wasn't very efficient on that release. I'm not sure if the lesser grain detail in the UK release is a result of light DNR or just the brightness boosting and low bitrate muddying the definition.

It's just the bitrate.

I've noticed that it's also authored a bit strangely, you can't just change between regular audio and the commentaries, they're a seperate playlist. Had some other discs like this before (Animatrix was one).

Pre-ordered this but haven't received it yet. The video quality seems fine but I really don't get why the western distributors feel the need to tinker with the contrast of anime releases (same thing already happened with Ninja Scroll, Lain and many others). They should have went with one huge package and all 26 episodes, but oh well - I'm grateful someone is releasing this at all in Region B. Hopefully someone will also release Berserk TV BDs.

P.S. How's the packaging quality as I heard both positive and negative feedback about it?