My father recently acquired a 37 inch full-HD (1080p) HDTV and a Samsung BD-P1400 Blu-ray disc player. Thus I’ve been playing my collection of anime DVDs on it, which is partly the reason why my posting has slowed. My collection consists of R1 (American), R2 (Japanese) and R3 (local, Taiwanese), DVDs.

I contemplated providing pictures to support this, but I don’t think the picture quality of a normal digital camera will be able to differentiate the animation quality between the different regions.

The Blu-Ray disc player I own can play Blu-Ray discs that are region A, which is essentially all Blu-Ray discs that I am interested in purchasing as Region A include America, Japan and South-East asia. It can also play all DVDs from all regions, which was an important factor in helping my father choose the player as I own DVDs from almost all regions.

As most High Definition entertainment enthusiasts should know, a Blu-Ray disc player can upscale DVDs from their original 480p quality (already much higher than fansub quality) to a sub-HD quality of 720i (HD qualities are from lowest to highest: 720p, 1080i and 1080p).

Knowing this, I eagerly popped in my Clannad R2s and gave it a spin. I wasn’t that impressed by the image upscaling and was rather dissappointed actually. After watching the imba animation quality scene of the moe loli beckoning to her robot and the OP a few times, I ejected the disc and inserted a Kanon R1.

Surprisingly, the quality of the Kanon OP from the R1 was much better than the Clannad R2. I was shocked because on my DVD players the R2s are always superior to the R1s in terms of both picture and sound quality. While the Clannad OP was rather grainy, the Kanon OP was very clear and quite obviously much better than the many DVD iterations that I have watched.

After watching 2 episodes of Kanon (4 and 5), I popped in a R3 copy of local licensor Blue Max’s A Place Promised in Our Early Days (directed by Makoto Shinkai). I noted the upscaling was rather similar to the R1 upscaling, but perhaps slightly less clear. Much better than the R2 upscaling though.

I don’t know much about how the different region DVDs work, but aren’t the different regions just meant to be economically distorting restrictions? I don’t think they should actually affect picture quality, but this is a Blu-Ray player utilising new technology that we’re talking about. Perhaps there could be a slight difference in the optical disc technology used.

Also, when I checked my player’s user’s manual, my Blu-Ray disc is not supposed to be able to play R1 and R2 DVDs. This is rather confusing, because the R1 DVD picture quality was the clearest.

Just a little something to note if you are an avid purchaser of R2s and are thinking of upscaling them with a Blu-Ray disc player, because it isn’t going to wow you at any rate if you ask me. Really a pity though, because even though R2s are the most expensive DVDs, they still offer the most collector’s value compared to R1 and R3 releases.