Video:

As much as ive been disappointed with the last several MAC sets ive bought this one comes out excessively well. While I never noticed any instances of pixelation the video has hints of the slightly washed out MAC look, although its not nearly as bad as many of there other sets. Overall I would say its slightly above average, almost hard to tell that all 3 discs are DVD-5. I actually didn't think they were at first given the video quality. Its suprising how well MAC managed to fit all 26 episodes on 3 DVD-5's with virtually no pixelation, I have older three disc DVD-9 perfect collections from FX that have worse video coding.

Audio:

English and Japanese seem to be spot on, but because I only have a stereo tv I really didn't get to test the English 5.1 (The japanese is 2.0). So I give it two thumbs up.

Subtitle:

Comes with the official English subs by ADV, which are of course great, and some apparently well done Spanish fansubs. The Spanish subs are just for the video though, they dont cover the beginning and ending songs as the English ones do.

Comment:

Azumanga Daioh is a really enjoyable and funny series,well the first half of it anyway, then it gets kind of repetitive and mind numbing, still worth a buy though. This is a pretty decent perfect collection, especially coming from MAC. Although I dont own the EZ set my brother does and it has anti-aliasing and pixelation issues in high motion scenes. So for once in its life time I would say MAC has the superior set, despite it being D5.

Video:

Excellent video quality throughout! The episodes are spread between three DVDs 9/9/8 - these are taken from the R1 version with English credits. I didn't see any blockiness or pixellation, and the colours look superb.

Audio:

There are 2 audio tracks - Japanese 2.0 and English 5.1. I listened to the English dub (which I thought was very well done) and the sound was flawless throughout, all perfectly synched.

Subtitle:

There are 3 subtitle tracks - English (translated from the Japanese), English lyrics/screen text and Spanish. The lyrics/text option didn't seem to miss anything out. I checked out some of the Spanish one, just for fun (I don't know much Spanish) and it seemed ok, apart from no lyric translation.

Comment:

Extras for this set are: DVD 1 - production art 3min45sec + clean OP & ED, DVD 2 - production art 2min + clean OP & ED, DVD 3 - mini episode of Azudai in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen (which has some better animation! See what an Azumanga Daioh movie would look like!!) + production art 6min15sec + clean OP & ED. It took me a few episodes to really get into the humour of this show - very weird and off-kilter. But the characters are so great that you soon get drawn in. I like the creepy teacher, Kimura-sensei - his scenes just crack me up! Gets wonderfully surreal in places too! This set is excellent in almost every aspect - the packaging is nice too. A must-have! Only downer is that MAC refuse to give us any chapter breaks during the eps - but I can live with that!