seiyuu3

2007 Christmas week sees two big seiyuu DVD releases - Yukarin’s concert DVD “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” and Minorin’s first music clip DVD “Message 01″. So how do they stack up and are they worth the price of admission? Read on.

First, Yukarin’s concert DVD set containing footage from the 2006 Christmas concert “Pinkle Twinkle Party” as well as this year’s summer tour “Sweet Milky Way”. After a few fumbles in the beginning, the past couple of years King Record’s concert DVD products has improved dramatically and has remained pretty solid - both in terms of the quality of the actual content on the disk as well as the presentation of the package. “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” keeps up with the trend, so what you get for 6,800yen is a massive 3 disk set in a 4 fold digi pack, a nice thick booklet containing pictures and interviews, and a hard cardboard box to house it all. Click on the second and third picture for large size photo.

Just looking at the pictures, you can tell that King Record really knows the people they are selling to. It’s all good and well that the package is pretty, so how about the actual content? Again keeping up with their recent effort, what you get is the concert recorded in anamorphic widescreen with linear PCM stereo sound - this is about as good as they can get without moving to HD disks such as Blu-ray or HD-DVD (FWIW, Suara’s concert on Blu-ray was beautiful, so I’m eagerly waiting for a Nana-chan or Yukarin concert on a HD disk). The video compression is also good, so visually it is nice as well, check out a few screen grabs below (click for full size):

Some of you might have read my ranting against the Haruhi Gekisou DVD at other places, for reference’s sake, here’s a grab from the Gekisou DVD, again click for full size.

Compare the crispness of the screen grabs, added with the fact that the Gekisou DVD was 4:3 letterboxed (with insane overscan compensation) and I think it should be clear that the Gekisou DVD was a damn mess. Not to mention the difference in price was only a mere 800yen and I think you can understand my beef with the Gekisou disk.

As for the content’s side, we’ve talked about Yukarin’s live performance enough here but it’s worth repeating - she sings well and her MCs are fun, so you do get your money’s worth.

Moving on to Minorin’s “Message 01″

The packaging is not fancy - only coming in a standard CD size jewel case, no big deal, but my first big disappointment was the 4:3 letterbox video despite the fact that the entire disk’s video was in widescreen! On the plus side though there were no major problems with the video compression, so not all were lost.

This is the second Lantis produce DVD that I’ve bought - Animelo 2007 being the first which had bad video compression - and judging from this disk it looks like Lantis could learn a thing or two from King Record. Other than that though, the content itself was quite substantial with 96 minutes of running time, off setting the original fear of a 3,000yen price tag for 3 PV clips. The documentary section makes up the bulk of it and it will take me some time to get through the entire disk, though quickly skimming through the footage I found some nice gems in there including videos of Minorin’s street live days in Akihabara, definitely worth watching to see just how far she had came. Included with the DVD was a bonus audio CD containing one track titled “Contact 13th”. My first reaction was to ripped it and add it as the 13th track to the Contact album playlist, then I replace the mangled album version of “Shinji no Tabi” with the full version from the DVD and gave it a few play through and all of a sudden it made the album seem more complete. Surprising how one or two tracks can make or break an entire album. As a side note, Lantis collaborated with the usual anime goods stores for extra goodies and Animate was giving out special posters:

When I saw the sample on Lantis’ special page I knew I had to get the disk at Animate just for this poster, and I have to say it is one of the better free posters I’ve got from Animate for a long long time. Now I’ll just have to decide whether I want to use this poster in place of the Junpaku Sanctuary poster currently on the wall.

In conclusion, Yukarin’s DVD is another quality product that is highly recommended to anyone having a passing interest in her music career. On the other hand, Minorin’s DVD would not disappoint hardcore fans, however I don’t think it will be as worthy of a purchase to non-followers compared to the Yukarin DVD.

This entry was posted by houkoholic on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 02:26 and is filed under その他, 田村ゆかり, 茅原実里, 音楽. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.