You bring up a good point to consider about the flow of the animation. Another item to consider is the audio, and whether it has any issue. You’ll be glad to hear that I never mentioned these because I didn’t consider them because there are no issues with them.

The video will have lower quality/more compression artifacts, but the video plays smoothly. I didn’t see any issues with the animation flow. I also don’t recall any issues with audio. Granted, I haven’t watched every episode on every bootleg, only random samplings.

I hope to extract the subtitles from the Pioneer release (to use when watching the episodes with the Japanese remastered release), and if I’m able to successfully do that, I may do the same for the non-Pioneer subtitles, and do a post comparing the two. However, there’s no telling if I’ll ever get something like that completed, so I’d say if the clarity of the translation is a top issue above accuracy of colors, the Pioneer bootleg would be the way to go.

Good luck on your purchases. This is such a cute series with a well thought out storyline, and the company that made it probably has earned back more than the money they put into it, so it’s a shame there isn’t a release in production and at a reasonable price including Pioneer’s English subtitles. It’s a lost market right there.

What does compression do to the video quality as far as smoothness of animation? Are the versions that are compressed onto fewer discs jumpier? I can handle poor picture quality and some color anomalies, but my sticking points are smooth animation and intelligible subtitles. (I discovered this pet peeve after watching an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! in Japanese, where the subtitling was particularly horrendous.)

I’m leaning towards the Pioneer release because of what you say about the subtitles, but how is the animation flow?

I don’t expect to see a new CCS release. A lot of US anime (and manga) companies seem to be having hard times right now (but I don’t know about in the UK or Australia). CCS might still be licensed to the company that released it on DVD before, so another company might not be able to release the remastered yet (I don’t know). Also, if a company wanted to release the remaster, they have to either translate everything on their own, or pay to reuse the existing subtitles.

If you decide buying a bootleg is your better option, the bootleg of Pioneer’s DVDs are copied from the region one DVDs. It also has the cropping and bad coloring of the region one release.

The AnimeCartoon release has the better colors and less cropping, but it also has worse compression than the region one, a less-good translation, an AnimeCartoon logo that shows now and then, and sometimes really bad compression.

If you cannot get the region one DVDs, I recommend the bootleg of the Pioneer region one DVDs if you want a better translation, or the AnimeCartoon if you want better colors and no cropping (but don’t mind things like a random logo on the screen). Both will have bad compression to fit on only eight DVDs.

So do you still think that there won’t be a re-release of Cardcaptor Sakura? Because i’ve seen so many forums in stuff about people who want it re-released….It would be so nice if a good company licensed it and sold CCS with the remastered dvds, playable on region 1, and with subs for a reasonable price~ Although right now all of that seems like a fantasy, ehe…But plus, then the original region 1 dvd prices would go down too, and i bet lots of people would want it (judging from forums)….So it doesn’t seem like a bad idea for a company~?

Sorry for asking so many questions, but…what would you consider to be the best bootleg? (If they’re legal) Or do you think in terms of quality/availability, the region 1 dvds are better? I think the green blobs on the bootlegs kinda bother me a little… ^^’

That set looks like it’s probably a bootleg. A bootleg is an unofficial copy of a product that is sold by a person or vendor who is not the owner, and is not an authorized vendor.

For DVDs, a bootleg usually has worse quality, will be region free, and often will have Chinese subtitles and bad English subtitles.

The back of the box shown on that listing says it uses four DVDs (if I’m reading it correctly. This sounds like the two movies are on one DVD, and the 70 episodes are on the three DVDs. This means there will probably be 23 or 24 episodes on each DVD. High quality (official) DVDs may have four to seven episodes on a DVD. More episodes than seven means lower quality.

I hope this helps =)

http://cgi.ebay.com/CARDCAPTOR-SAKURA-Vol-1-70-End-2-Movie-ANIME-DVD-/260687152255?pt=US_DVD_HD_DVD_Blu_ray&hash=item3cb22a447f#ht_2591wt_966

Do you know if this is also a bootleg? (Also…sorry for asking but…what exactly is a bootleg?) Also, do you know if this is a good version? If you don’t know, that’s absolutely fine, but thank you so much for reading this~!

1) You have the cash to afford it, and can spend that kind of money on it. (We’re talking $1,000 here.)

2) You feel justified in spending that amount of money on a 70-episode series.

3) You have no problems with a series in Japanese with no English subtitles.

4) You have a DVD player that can play region 3 DVDs. These will not play on a region one player.