Was trying to download the Kiss X sis Blu-ray rips, since I have plenty of anime and some download quota I just feel I must use.  Coalgirls has released it as 720p and 1080p, but I was a bit suss over the 1080p rips, so I downloaded the OP to see if it really was 1080p worthy.  The simple test is to take image captures from the video, and then downscale to 720p and upscale back to 1080p and compare with the original capture to see if there’s any difference between the two.  Trying this on some relatively more detailed scenes, I couldn’t tell the difference between the two (even with 2x zooming), so I guess I’ll be getting the 720p version of it (not that I’ll be re-watching it or anything, lol).

Whilst I was doing the comparisons, I decided to try it on the K-On! BD rips as I actually downloaded all 14 episodes of it (done by Thora).  I didn’t bother to check whether it really is 1080p worthy before I downloaded it (I thought Thora were relatively good with this stuff), so I decided to do it then.  Well, there actually does appear to be a slight difference – the original being a tad bit sharper than the upscale, however, I suspect this is due to the Lanczos resampler that I’m using – a sharpen filter can probably fix that.  Detail wise, there doesn’t actually appear to be any difference between the two.  So damn, I’ve wasted a bit of bandwidth and HDD space for something a bit useless >_>  I guess I’ll be double-checking 1080p rips before downloading them (if they offer a 720p version).

Well, I’ve known that there’s really not much 1080p material around, but I expected more to be available these days.  Especially anime – well, maybe I’m wrong, but I’d guess that it’s mostly done by CG or vectoring, so should easily scale up to arbitrary resolutions, but then, on the other hand, I guess there’s a detail limitation with these things.  As opposed to live action capture, where the studios need to deal with issues like limited optical resolutions of the cameras they use.