Forum - View topicNEWS: Bandai Visual USA to be Liquidated by September
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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I never did understand Bandai having two seperate companies competing against each other. Seemed a bit schizoid to me. Lets hope we get more hybrid releases now at reasonable prices.
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cat_clan
 Posts: 67 Location: Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico |
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I agree with dormcat, 49.90 is not that bad if you compare it to another countries.
For the double of that price (taking in consideration exchange rates and average income using GDP per capita) I get a DVD with 3 episodes, VHS video quality and audio 2.0, spanish/english audio only and no subs. So yeah, I would pay 49.90 if my income was at the pair of GDP per capite of the US. |
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the_ferret
Posts: 17 |
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Agreed. Most anime DVDs aren't any better than rips or fansubs, and I don't like to pay for something I can get for free just for the sake of paying for it. I always thought BV's strategy made a lot of sense in that regard, but I guess not. Too bad, they released some good titles and I always felt better about putting money toward something with more effort invested than a disc in bare-bones packaging. |
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Keonyn
 Subscriber Posts: 5567 Location: Coon Rapids, MN |
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BV's methos just didn't make their product accessible to the casual fan, and the casual fan makes up the majority of the market. You could plate a car in gold and give it the nicest parts known to exist, but chances are you'd be bankrupt as very few would have the means to buy it.
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Moomintroll
 Posts: 1600 Location: Nottingham (UK) |
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But, while they're not producing gold plated cars, there are plenty of car companies that do quite well out of selling extremely expensive cars to extremely small markets (Rolls Royce; Bentley; Aston Martin; Ferrari; Koenigsegg and so on and so forth). Selling to the wealthy may be a niche market but it is, nonetheless, a (potentially) viable market. You don't necessarily have to be Ford, GM or Toyota to make a profit. The difference is that people buy Aston Martins, at least in part, in order to be able to look down their noses at Ford drivers but, in the topsy-turvy world of anime, it's primarily those who pay nothing at all who believe themselves to be superior. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4621 |
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Yes, but besides wanting a status symbol, people buy those sorts of cars because they offer a lot more than what a Ford Escort or Honda Civic can provide. In contrast, Bandai Visual was offering less for the increased price. (Before you ask, no, I don't consider potentially slightly better video quality to be anything "more.") It's the equivalent of trying to sell a Ferrari that gets only 200 horsepower. |
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Xenofan 29A
 Posts: 378 |
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Higher (and indeed, significantly higher) video quality is "more". BV also gave us some of the better booklets I've seen with anime discs. Whether these are enough to justify the prices, of course, is a matter of opinion, but you cannot objectively state that BV's releases did not give "more"; you may only state that they did not add any value in your eyes. |
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HitokiriShadow
 Posts: 6251 |
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It wasn't just priced outside the range of casual fans, it was priced even beyond what most "hardcore" fans and collectors would be willing to pay. |
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krelyan
Posts: 173 Location: Utah |
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For which releases? The only ones I saw that came with any significant sized booklets were their first couple releases. And the Gunbuster edit aside, I don't think that many fans were not satisfied with BV at that point. |
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Top Gun
Posts: 4621 |
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I'll give you the image quality (though I feel like you'd have to be extremely videophilic to care all that much about it, or maybe even to notice it), and possibly even the booklets (although I own two separate series, the Eva Platinum disks and Haibane Renmei, which have fantastic booklets in their own right), but what I really meant by "more" was raw content, thus the horsepower analogy. If their releases contained three or four episodes at high video quality, plus worthwhile booklets, plus a dub, then I could see $40 or $50 per volume being justifiable. But two subbed-only episodes? I don't care how big of a fan you are; that's just asinine, and now they've paid the price for it. |
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Porcupine
 Posts: 1033 |
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I fully agree that you should never pay for something you can get for free just for the sake of paying for it, or for "moral" reasons. That's just my thoughts. But I disagree that most anime DVDs aren't any better than rips or fansubs. Almost always a commercial anime DVD in the USA is better video quality, however anime DVD video quality in the USA is often also far from perfect. For some sense of scale typically I would rate most commercial anime DVDs in the USA from a C+ to C- scale in quality, with the very best DVDs getting a B (select ADVision and Geneon titles, and most or all BVUSA titles). And I would probably rate most import Japanese R2 DVDs with a B. But fansubs generally go from a C to a F. The majority are probably C- but there's a reasonable amount of Ds and Fs that make me question the ability of fansub-lovers to judge video quality. In the past year though fansubs are way better quality because Japan started to broadcast TV in HD, but the typical HD fansub still gets only a C from me, but some get Bs. Nothing comes close to being an A, which is only for good quality HD. And I've only ever seen one fansub so far that was BETTER quality than the cruddy USA R1 DVD version. Namely the Haruhi series done by the group Hitsuji. It was ripped from the superior Japanese R2 DVDs and de-interlaced and re-encoded correctly and perfectly, with no pre-filters, as very high bitrate H264 files. I give them a B which is the highest grade possible that I give for anything SD. Bandai Entertainment's R1 Haruhi I give a C-, it's a botched job. I'm always on the lookout for top-quality fansubs though, especially those which are better than the cruddy R1 DVD versions. I was thinking of making a thread on that subject sometime but so far I only know of one example so that's not much to talk about. There are probably a small handful of fansubs that are comparable quality to the R1 DVDs, though. |
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