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Digimon Tamers BD-Box! Scans, Screencaps, & Discussion! & Audio Drama Translation!
The newest Digimon Blu-ray box came out a few days ago and after a lot of scanning and editing we have quite a bit to go over!
After a two year wait since the Digimon Adventure 02 box came out, Digimon Tamers finally has a Blu-ray box to call it's own.
It's been nearly 8 months since the box was announced, so let's dig into how it came out after a decent wait.
As normal, I won't be reviewing the show itself, just going over the actual Blu-ray release, although there is a bit more this time...
Any screencaps from the Blu-rays are lossless PNGs.
All images in the article are smaller copies from our gallery (to keep loading sizes smaller for everyone), but link to the full sized versions when clicked.
Scanning was done as high quality as I could do, and compressed and shrunk to reasonable sizes, along with reasonable quality JPG compression. I've explained my workflow in my personal thread and will answer any questions involving it or the processes used.
Scanning this time went oddly smoothly. I had to pull the scanner back down a few times for some odds and ends, but in general everything went quite well. This may partially be based on streamlining what DPI I start with based on looking for the same end quality, but allowing all the work to go quicker.
First up will be all the physical stuff. Everything included with the Blu-ray was scanned minus two things (a generic Blu-ray instruction sheet and some normal brown cardboard.)
In addition I've taken photos to help show off the set better. I believe I'll continue to do this in the future if it's well received.
We start with... an obi card!
This obi card covers the front, spine, and back of the Digimon Tamers box and contains various product details so that the box itself ends up clean.
The left side had a minimal box title, along with the contents of the Blu-ray box. The spine portion has the Digimon Tamers logo so it can be spotted on a store shelf easily. And the right side contains some details about it being in HD, along with cast and staff info.
The left and right sides also fold into the box itself for grip. The folds contain silhouettes of Culumon and Impmon.
On to the box itself!
The artwork for the box is nothing less than spectacular. Featuring new artwork from series character designer Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru, it's hard ot say much about it other than wow.
On the front we have our primary Tamers along with their Digimon. Takato, Guilmon, Ruki, Renamon, Jianliang, and Terriermon. Each is drawn amazingly well, and the details and personality stand out.
On the spine we have the 'tamerless' Impmon and Culumon. Culumon looking cute, and Impmon appearing slightly pleased with himself match the characters well. Behind them you can see the building Hypnos was headquartered in, and underneath them is a very simple 'Digimon Tamers' text in lieu of a logo.
On the back we have the other Tamers and Digimon that join as the show goes along: Ryo, Cyberdramon, Hirokazu, Guardromon, Kenta, MarineAngemon, Juri, Leomon, Shuichon, and Lopmon. These also show quite a bit of personality, but I feel like my favorite is probably Lopmon appearing strained carrying Shuichon.
The box is clearly designed to fit the 'kids running with their Digimon' theme that Adventure and 02 used, but has put it's own twist on it. First off, there is no slipcover. Instead the kids and their Digimon are slightly raised off the surface and are glossier than the background. Perhaps more obvious is the change of camera angle. Instead of a sideways run, the kids are all running forward. It's a great way to continue the theme, but allow a show that started over to have it's own style.
The top of the box is simply the minimal Digimon Tamers text that appears a number of times on the set, while the bottom includes various technical and legal details.
Inside the main box are two digistacks holding the discs.
The boxes go from left to right order, but I admit I've put them in the reverse order when I put the box away. They fit snugly in the case alongside a booklet.
The first digistack features another image drawn by Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru. This one features the kids and their Digimon at the park. Nakatsuru went a bit looser with the design this time, likely having a bit of fun. It's a great piece of art that shows off a fun moment between the characters. This type of image contains the theme of the first digistack being a more casual image of the kids and Digimon that the Adventure and 02 boxes used.
The inside features a nice shot of the sky, along with a disc/episode guide. Due to the way the digistack is designed it's not easy to get a decent scan. The gallery also has a perspective corrected scan and a photo of the left side for those who want to see them uncovered.
The first digistack contains the first 4 discs.
The discs this time use the character artwork the same way the Adventure and 02 boxes did, giving each Digimon and kid a featured disc with their art, but it skips the 'eye' motif to show the D-Arks instead.
The second digistack contains yet another new piece of art by Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru! This time we get a heroic shot of the Ultimate level Digimon rushing into battle (I assume MarineAngemon is floating off to the side somewhere.) The space is used well to show each Digimon rushing forward. The details here are really nice, and having Dukemon riding on Grani instead of being Dukemon Crimson Mode feels like it benefits the shot by using Dukemon and Grani to help frame things. This one is another twist on what the prior boxes did. Before we had good vs. evil face-offs, while this just see the heroic side as they rush off.
The inside features a nice shot of digital sky, along with a disc/episode guide. Again, due to the way the digistack is designed it's not easy to get a decent scan. The gallery also has a perspective corrected scan and a photo of the left side for those who want to see them uncovered.
The second digistack contains the last 4 discs.
The disc theme of the kids, Digimon, and their D-Arks continue here.
The box also contained a booklet.
The booklets front looks like the back of a Digimon card, which were used quite a bit in the show. The back features a nice blue and black design that almost gives the appears of rocks under water. The Digimon Tamers logo and a D-Ark are shown, outlined in white.
For now I'm not scanning the booklet as it's all pre-existing material reformulated from the prior DVD booklets (which themselves had a lot of reused content.)
Well, it isn't ALL pre-existing... there are two new interviews. We're in the midst of trying to get those translated, so hopefully we have those soon.
If you pre-ordered the box from Amazon you got a bonus item...
I was expecting something akin to a nice piece of big cardstock with this shiny image on it... imagine my surprise at what showed up!
It's a woven canvas pulled over and bolted to a wood frame... and it's bigger than my scanner.
Above is a center scan of it as good as I could do, along with a photo of the whole board. I've also taken separate scans and am working on putting them together into a massive scan, hopefully with no seams.
The new art of Dukemon and Beelzebumon is fantastic, and it's an extremely nice bonus item to get!
It was so spectacular I had to try and scan it even better (especially since it was only a 'little' bigger than my scanner...) So I scanned it in pieces and got the help of my friend Logan to properly put it together.
The image still doesn't go entirely to the edge though. The edges didn't scan that well due to how it was scanned in pieces, but it shows more than the original scan above.
And last up for the physical things in the set... the new audio drama...
Digimon Tamers 2018- Days ~Information and the Unordinary~
The new Digimon Tamers audio drama is included with the first print version of the Blu-ray box, which means any restocks, or even late pre-orders, will not have it. The name of the audio drama itself seems to be based on the title of the second ending theme, Days -Love and the Everyday-
It comes wrapped with the Blu-ray box itself in some very nice quality plastic that appears to be meant to be kept so you can rewrap the box if you want.
This box itself is just relatively cheap cardstock that's used to house the actual CD case. The artwork is the same used elsewhere on the Blu-ray box, simply in monochrome for cheaper printing. Credits and details are printed on the front, to allow them to be seen when the box is still in the plastic wrap. Both spine sides were identical so only one was scanned.
The CD was packaged in a CD-Album style case (the normal CD case most people are familiar with.) To fit inside the Blu-ray sized outer box there was plain cardboard that had been cut and folded to act as a tray. Since it had no artwork or other material on it it wasn't scanned.
The cover for the audio drama is simply the Takato and Guilmon art from the Blu-ray box. Using them isn't that shocking since Tamers began with them, and you'd have to assume they'd be a large part of a sequel. A nice touch is how Guilmon's tail goes over the titling at the top.
The cover is the front to a small fold out booklet.
It opens to a table of contents along with comments from the cast.
More cast comments, along with staff comments.
Staff comments finish here, and Chiaki Konaka's liner notes begin here. As he mentioned on Twitter, the liner notes are meant to help inform and flesh out elements of the world of Digimon Tamers 2018. A number of these are explanations of real world concepts that might be unfamiliar to listeners.
The liner notes continue on for the rest of the book until the end.
The back cover acts as the final page of the booklet, having cast and staff credits.
And we finish the packaging with a scan of the disc itself.
It's a very simple and clean cover. It uses a dark blue and white label, with clear material in various places to have silhouettes of the characters as they appear on the box. This type of simple label works really well for me.
I do think Ruki and Takato could have used some better separation from their Digimon though so their silhouettes stood out better.
We'll be back to the audio drama a bit later...
For now... onto the disc contents itself!
The video is encoded using AVC at an average bitrate of roughly 36 Mbps. Fantastic bitrate for animated content in general. Tamers is encoded at 1080i and 30 frames per second. This in and of itself was expected because of the way the show was made and the way the BD spec is (Digimon was made with mixed framerate, which Blu-ray can't do, but via trickery that I've never 100% understood using 1080i mixed framerate content is apparently possible.)
The audio is a 2.0 PCM track. Good uncompressed 16-bit audio. The audio is generally smooth and crisp and is effectively the same as prior releases. There isn't much to say about the audio because it's exactly what you would expect (and as I've said before, it isn't even 'that' different than the audio you'd expect on a number of Blu-rays for new shows coming out today.)
No subtitles are included, which is expected.
The video is where there is more to talk about. In fact, due to the video, and the high interest fans have in this set, I took screencaps from both the first and last episode.
The 1080i encoding itself appears to have been done properly, so any standard hardware can deinterlace the picture to 1080p without any visual oddities, minus the times there are oddities in the source material.
A number of times watching, if you look close, lines would appear a bit shaky. These in general would be unnoticeable from across a room, minus at least one shot of Dukemon Crimson Mode I saw in the finale, which looked so terrible I checked the disc on multiple players to make sure it wasn't a software error. An example of that is provided below, but it should be noted that this is an absolute worst case scenario, and it only came up once while I was skimming.
Due to the production era the show was made in, the set looks roughly how you would expect. With master tapes at 480i there is only so much you can do.
In most cases filtering appears to have a more deft hand than Adventure and 02 had, so things appear less smudgy. This, combined with Tamers having better quality masters than Adventure and most of 02 (most of them were finalized to composite videotape, which creates any number of issues, while Tamers was produced on component tape) means that in general, the picture quality appears relatively decent.
But it also means when there are issues, there is less hiding it. The various issues introduced by composite video itself served to hide certain rough edges in Adventure and 02, as did the more aggressive filtering.
Various assets used in Tamers were clearly low resolution and simply don't scale up cleanly. In general this is more problematic when you are looking at a screenshot a few inches away from a computer monitor than sitting and watching at a TV though.
Much like Adventure and 02 in their sets, this is the best the show has looked, and it likely couldn't look much better. There are certainly issues, but in general they are expected issues owing to the age and production of the show itself. Assuming we get Frontier and Savers sets, I would expect them to look roughly identical to this unless Happinet changes it's upscaling method yet again.
The menus are quite nice.
It starts with the logo which vanishes, and then all the characters flash in with a digital effect while The Biggest Dreamer plays, along with clips in a window. It's a busier menu than I tend to like, but using assets from the packaging means it works well.
Each episode has a small chapter selection submenu that pops up if you click on it and the final disc has a menu for the handful of extras included with the set.
Speaking of...
Time for extras!
There's only a few on the set.
A clean version of the original version of the opening The Biggest Dreamer.
A clean version of the updated version of the opening The Biggest Dreamer.
A clean version of the first ending theme, My Tomorrow.
A clean version of the second ending theme, Days -Love and the Everyday-.
The episode ending cards. Both the version from episodes 1 thru 50 and the one from episode 51 are included. The one for episodes 1 thru 50 says "See you again!" and the one for episode 51 says "Thanks for your support!"
That's about what we expected, so even if it's nothing special, it's nice to get good quality versions of the opening and ending themes, along with the ending cards (although those didn't get upscaled that well to be honest.)
It's also worth mentioning that the opening and endings used in the episodes had their credits redone from scratch, so the credits in them look relatively crisp.
It's been a decent wait for this box for Tamers' fans, but it appears to be about as good as could be expected. The video jumps up and down, but is about as good as you'd expect for this. The box itself is gorgeous and looks great. And it even comes with a new audio drama that acts as a sequel. It's a pretty fantastic release.
Of course, there's a bit more to talk about... but first some standard business...
A few photos of it how it was packaged and before I pulled open the plastic.
Screencaps were taken largely at random while jumping around (although if I knew a moment was coming up I wanted a cap of, I'd wait or take extras.)
Various additional screen captures are in our gallery:
Episode 1, Menus, and Extras
Episode 51
The scans can all be found in the gallery.
The scans are very small compared to the master scans I did (the work and backup folder structure for the scans and screencaps was over 36 gigs.) I will try and make wallpapers if people are interested. If you want to see a specific screencap of something give me a rough timecode if you can.
The Digimon Tamers Blu-ray Box is still available to order. Be aware many stores are actively advertising that the first print version is sold out. The first link is a CDJapan affiliate link that helps the site.
Digimon Tamers BD-Box
Digimon Tamers BD-Box Amazon Edition (includes F4 size (8.27 x 12.99 inches) fine board.)
Lots of Digimon stuff is coming out soon and supporting us via our Patreon or donations would be greatly appreciated so that we can do more breakdowns and improve the site. Feel free to join us in the Discord if you want to chat about the Blu-ray or tri.
More things to come!
Images are hosted on our gallery and embedded on the forum, so let us know if anything is acting up.
But then as mentioned a few times... there's a bit more in the next post...
Update- We have first week sales for Tamers on Blu-ray thanks to ANN.
First week sales put Digimon Tamers on Blu-ray at 2nd place on the anime Blu-ray charts with sales of 2,034.
With all the pushing Toei, Konaka, Happinet, etc. did this would appear to not be a great showing based on prior Digimon Blu-ray boxes.
While we never expected it to touch the week 1 sales Adventure got (12,094), which were abnormally high, to only end up hitting roughly 2/3rds of Zero-Two's numbers (3,171), especially with the heavy promotion they did on social media regarding the set and it having a new audio drama by the original stuff that acted as a sequel, it's hard to take this as having done well.
While a bit harder to compare, the Digimon the Movies Blu-ray box sold 5,190 it's first week.
The Digimon Tamers Blu-ray Box isn't a failure as far as performance for legacy anime content on Blu-ray, but it feels like Tamers should have done more based around the energy the release seemed to have.
Update- There are no numbers for second week sales of Digimon Tamers on Blu-ray because the box did not chart for that week.
The last item we have numbers for is Toy Story 2 at 20th place on the anime Blu-ray charts. It sold 210 copies in it's 206th week.
The newest Digimon Blu-ray box came out a few days ago and after a lot of scanning and editing we have quite a bit to go over!
After a two year wait since the Digimon Adventure 02 box came out, Digimon Tamers finally has a Blu-ray box to call it's own.
It's been nearly 8 months since the box was announced, so let's dig into how it came out after a decent wait.
As normal, I won't be reviewing the show itself, just going over the actual Blu-ray release, although there is a bit more this time...
Any screencaps from the Blu-rays are lossless PNGs.
All images in the article are smaller copies from our gallery (to keep loading sizes smaller for everyone), but link to the full sized versions when clicked.
Scanning was done as high quality as I could do, and compressed and shrunk to reasonable sizes, along with reasonable quality JPG compression. I've explained my workflow in my personal thread and will answer any questions involving it or the processes used.
Scanning this time went oddly smoothly. I had to pull the scanner back down a few times for some odds and ends, but in general everything went quite well. This may partially be based on streamlining what DPI I start with based on looking for the same end quality, but allowing all the work to go quicker.
First up will be all the physical stuff. Everything included with the Blu-ray was scanned minus two things (a generic Blu-ray instruction sheet and some normal brown cardboard.)
In addition I've taken photos to help show off the set better. I believe I'll continue to do this in the future if it's well received.
We start with... an obi card!
This obi card covers the front, spine, and back of the Digimon Tamers box and contains various product details so that the box itself ends up clean.
The left side had a minimal box title, along with the contents of the Blu-ray box. The spine portion has the Digimon Tamers logo so it can be spotted on a store shelf easily. And the right side contains some details about it being in HD, along with cast and staff info.
The left and right sides also fold into the box itself for grip. The folds contain silhouettes of Culumon and Impmon.
On to the box itself!
The artwork for the box is nothing less than spectacular. Featuring new artwork from series character designer Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru, it's hard ot say much about it other than wow.
On the front we have our primary Tamers along with their Digimon. Takato, Guilmon, Ruki, Renamon, Jianliang, and Terriermon. Each is drawn amazingly well, and the details and personality stand out.
On the spine we have the 'tamerless' Impmon and Culumon. Culumon looking cute, and Impmon appearing slightly pleased with himself match the characters well. Behind them you can see the building Hypnos was headquartered in, and underneath them is a very simple 'Digimon Tamers' text in lieu of a logo.
On the back we have the other Tamers and Digimon that join as the show goes along: Ryo, Cyberdramon, Hirokazu, Guardromon, Kenta, MarineAngemon, Juri, Leomon, Shuichon, and Lopmon. These also show quite a bit of personality, but I feel like my favorite is probably Lopmon appearing strained carrying Shuichon.
The box is clearly designed to fit the 'kids running with their Digimon' theme that Adventure and 02 used, but has put it's own twist on it. First off, there is no slipcover. Instead the kids and their Digimon are slightly raised off the surface and are glossier than the background. Perhaps more obvious is the change of camera angle. Instead of a sideways run, the kids are all running forward. It's a great way to continue the theme, but allow a show that started over to have it's own style.
The top of the box is simply the minimal Digimon Tamers text that appears a number of times on the set, while the bottom includes various technical and legal details.
Inside the main box are two digistacks holding the discs.
The boxes go from left to right order, but I admit I've put them in the reverse order when I put the box away. They fit snugly in the case alongside a booklet.
The first digistack features another image drawn by Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru. This one features the kids and their Digimon at the park. Nakatsuru went a bit looser with the design this time, likely having a bit of fun. It's a great piece of art that shows off a fun moment between the characters. This type of image contains the theme of the first digistack being a more casual image of the kids and Digimon that the Adventure and 02 boxes used.
The inside features a nice shot of the sky, along with a disc/episode guide. Due to the way the digistack is designed it's not easy to get a decent scan. The gallery also has a perspective corrected scan and a photo of the left side for those who want to see them uncovered.
The first digistack contains the first 4 discs.
The discs this time use the character artwork the same way the Adventure and 02 boxes did, giving each Digimon and kid a featured disc with their art, but it skips the 'eye' motif to show the D-Arks instead.
The second digistack contains yet another new piece of art by Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru! This time we get a heroic shot of the Ultimate level Digimon rushing into battle (I assume MarineAngemon is floating off to the side somewhere.) The space is used well to show each Digimon rushing forward. The details here are really nice, and having Dukemon riding on Grani instead of being Dukemon Crimson Mode feels like it benefits the shot by using Dukemon and Grani to help frame things. This one is another twist on what the prior boxes did. Before we had good vs. evil face-offs, while this just see the heroic side as they rush off.
The inside features a nice shot of digital sky, along with a disc/episode guide. Again, due to the way the digistack is designed it's not easy to get a decent scan. The gallery also has a perspective corrected scan and a photo of the left side for those who want to see them uncovered.
The second digistack contains the last 4 discs.
The disc theme of the kids, Digimon, and their D-Arks continue here.
The box also contained a booklet.
The booklets front looks like the back of a Digimon card, which were used quite a bit in the show. The back features a nice blue and black design that almost gives the appears of rocks under water. The Digimon Tamers logo and a D-Ark are shown, outlined in white.
For now I'm not scanning the booklet as it's all pre-existing material reformulated from the prior DVD booklets (which themselves had a lot of reused content.)
Well, it isn't ALL pre-existing... there are two new interviews. We're in the midst of trying to get those translated, so hopefully we have those soon.
If you pre-ordered the box from Amazon you got a bonus item...
I was expecting something akin to a nice piece of big cardstock with this shiny image on it... imagine my surprise at what showed up!
It's a woven canvas pulled over and bolted to a wood frame... and it's bigger than my scanner.
Above is a center scan of it as good as I could do, along with a photo of the whole board. I've also taken separate scans and am working on putting them together into a massive scan, hopefully with no seams.
The new art of Dukemon and Beelzebumon is fantastic, and it's an extremely nice bonus item to get!
It was so spectacular I had to try and scan it even better (especially since it was only a 'little' bigger than my scanner...) So I scanned it in pieces and got the help of my friend Logan to properly put it together.
The image still doesn't go entirely to the edge though. The edges didn't scan that well due to how it was scanned in pieces, but it shows more than the original scan above.
And last up for the physical things in the set... the new audio drama...
Digimon Tamers 2018- Days ~Information and the Unordinary~
The new Digimon Tamers audio drama is included with the first print version of the Blu-ray box, which means any restocks, or even late pre-orders, will not have it. The name of the audio drama itself seems to be based on the title of the second ending theme, Days -Love and the Everyday-
It comes wrapped with the Blu-ray box itself in some very nice quality plastic that appears to be meant to be kept so you can rewrap the box if you want.
This box itself is just relatively cheap cardstock that's used to house the actual CD case. The artwork is the same used elsewhere on the Blu-ray box, simply in monochrome for cheaper printing. Credits and details are printed on the front, to allow them to be seen when the box is still in the plastic wrap. Both spine sides were identical so only one was scanned.
The CD was packaged in a CD-Album style case (the normal CD case most people are familiar with.) To fit inside the Blu-ray sized outer box there was plain cardboard that had been cut and folded to act as a tray. Since it had no artwork or other material on it it wasn't scanned.
The cover for the audio drama is simply the Takato and Guilmon art from the Blu-ray box. Using them isn't that shocking since Tamers began with them, and you'd have to assume they'd be a large part of a sequel. A nice touch is how Guilmon's tail goes over the titling at the top.
The cover is the front to a small fold out booklet.
It opens to a table of contents along with comments from the cast.
More cast comments, along with staff comments.
Staff comments finish here, and Chiaki Konaka's liner notes begin here. As he mentioned on Twitter, the liner notes are meant to help inform and flesh out elements of the world of Digimon Tamers 2018. A number of these are explanations of real world concepts that might be unfamiliar to listeners.
The liner notes continue on for the rest of the book until the end.
The back cover acts as the final page of the booklet, having cast and staff credits.
And we finish the packaging with a scan of the disc itself.
It's a very simple and clean cover. It uses a dark blue and white label, with clear material in various places to have silhouettes of the characters as they appear on the box. This type of simple label works really well for me.
I do think Ruki and Takato could have used some better separation from their Digimon though so their silhouettes stood out better.
We'll be back to the audio drama a bit later...
For now... onto the disc contents itself!
The video is encoded using AVC at an average bitrate of roughly 36 Mbps. Fantastic bitrate for animated content in general. Tamers is encoded at 1080i and 30 frames per second. This in and of itself was expected because of the way the show was made and the way the BD spec is (Digimon was made with mixed framerate, which Blu-ray can't do, but via trickery that I've never 100% understood using 1080i mixed framerate content is apparently possible.)
The audio is a 2.0 PCM track. Good uncompressed 16-bit audio. The audio is generally smooth and crisp and is effectively the same as prior releases. There isn't much to say about the audio because it's exactly what you would expect (and as I've said before, it isn't even 'that' different than the audio you'd expect on a number of Blu-rays for new shows coming out today.)
No subtitles are included, which is expected.
The video is where there is more to talk about. In fact, due to the video, and the high interest fans have in this set, I took screencaps from both the first and last episode.
The 1080i encoding itself appears to have been done properly, so any standard hardware can deinterlace the picture to 1080p without any visual oddities, minus the times there are oddities in the source material.
A number of times watching, if you look close, lines would appear a bit shaky. These in general would be unnoticeable from across a room, minus at least one shot of Dukemon Crimson Mode I saw in the finale, which looked so terrible I checked the disc on multiple players to make sure it wasn't a software error. An example of that is provided below, but it should be noted that this is an absolute worst case scenario, and it only came up once while I was skimming.
Due to the production era the show was made in, the set looks roughly how you would expect. With master tapes at 480i there is only so much you can do.
In most cases filtering appears to have a more deft hand than Adventure and 02 had, so things appear less smudgy. This, combined with Tamers having better quality masters than Adventure and most of 02 (most of them were finalized to composite videotape, which creates any number of issues, while Tamers was produced on component tape) means that in general, the picture quality appears relatively decent.
But it also means when there are issues, there is less hiding it. The various issues introduced by composite video itself served to hide certain rough edges in Adventure and 02, as did the more aggressive filtering.
Various assets used in Tamers were clearly low resolution and simply don't scale up cleanly. In general this is more problematic when you are looking at a screenshot a few inches away from a computer monitor than sitting and watching at a TV though.
Much like Adventure and 02 in their sets, this is the best the show has looked, and it likely couldn't look much better. There are certainly issues, but in general they are expected issues owing to the age and production of the show itself. Assuming we get Frontier and Savers sets, I would expect them to look roughly identical to this unless Happinet changes it's upscaling method yet again.
The menus are quite nice.
It starts with the logo which vanishes, and then all the characters flash in with a digital effect while The Biggest Dreamer plays, along with clips in a window. It's a busier menu than I tend to like, but using assets from the packaging means it works well.
Each episode has a small chapter selection submenu that pops up if you click on it and the final disc has a menu for the handful of extras included with the set.
Speaking of...
Time for extras!
There's only a few on the set.
A clean version of the original version of the opening The Biggest Dreamer.
A clean version of the updated version of the opening The Biggest Dreamer.
A clean version of the first ending theme, My Tomorrow.
A clean version of the second ending theme, Days -Love and the Everyday-.
The episode ending cards. Both the version from episodes 1 thru 50 and the one from episode 51 are included. The one for episodes 1 thru 50 says "See you again!" and the one for episode 51 says "Thanks for your support!"
That's about what we expected, so even if it's nothing special, it's nice to get good quality versions of the opening and ending themes, along with the ending cards (although those didn't get upscaled that well to be honest.)
It's also worth mentioning that the opening and endings used in the episodes had their credits redone from scratch, so the credits in them look relatively crisp.
It's been a decent wait for this box for Tamers' fans, but it appears to be about as good as could be expected. The video jumps up and down, but is about as good as you'd expect for this. The box itself is gorgeous and looks great. And it even comes with a new audio drama that acts as a sequel. It's a pretty fantastic release.
Of course, there's a bit more to talk about... but first some standard business...
A few photos of it how it was packaged and before I pulled open the plastic.
Screencaps were taken largely at random while jumping around (although if I knew a moment was coming up I wanted a cap of, I'd wait or take extras.)
Various additional screen captures are in our gallery:
Episode 1, Menus, and Extras
Episode 51
The scans can all be found in the gallery.
The scans are very small compared to the master scans I did (the work and backup folder structure for the scans and screencaps was over 36 gigs.) I will try and make wallpapers if people are interested. If you want to see a specific screencap of something give me a rough timecode if you can.
The Digimon Tamers Blu-ray Box is still available to order. Be aware many stores are actively advertising that the first print version is sold out. The first link is a CDJapan affiliate link that helps the site.
Digimon Tamers BD-Box
Digimon Tamers BD-Box Amazon Edition (includes F4 size (8.27 x 12.99 inches) fine board.)
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But then as mentioned a few times... there's a bit more in the next post...
Update- We have first week sales for Tamers on Blu-ray thanks to ANN.
First week sales put Digimon Tamers on Blu-ray at 2nd place on the anime Blu-ray charts with sales of 2,034.
With all the pushing Toei, Konaka, Happinet, etc. did this would appear to not be a great showing based on prior Digimon Blu-ray boxes.
While we never expected it to touch the week 1 sales Adventure got (12,094), which were abnormally high, to only end up hitting roughly 2/3rds of Zero-Two's numbers (3,171), especially with the heavy promotion they did on social media regarding the set and it having a new audio drama by the original stuff that acted as a sequel, it's hard to take this as having done well.
While a bit harder to compare, the Digimon the Movies Blu-ray box sold 5,190 it's first week.
The Digimon Tamers Blu-ray Box isn't a failure as far as performance for legacy anime content on Blu-ray, but it feels like Tamers should have done more based around the energy the release seemed to have.
Update- There are no numbers for second week sales of Digimon Tamers on Blu-ray because the box did not chart for that week.
The last item we have numbers for is Toy Story 2 at 20th place on the anime Blu-ray charts. It sold 210 copies in it's 206th week.
