Just a notice that all Blu-Rays of the 95 GITS are completely and hopelessly mangled (cropped, blurred and black crushed). The only "good" version is an old HDTV rip that was hand-remastered by Judgment; but with heavy smoothing in the process, a film grain shader to mask this is recommended.
That's beyond heartbreaking. Everything is somehow getting worse but I'd held out hope that something universally considered a masterpiece might get better treatment. Do you know if a better release exists in Japan?
Yeah exactly that. I had a crunchy roll subscription but shitcanned it in the end because the quality of the releases is an order of magnitude better from the pirates.
Eh, we lost the original moon tapes and George Lucas suppressed the theatrical Star Wars cut. Very common even in the modern era for this sort of thing to happen.
At least for the theatrical Star Wars cut there's an excellent fan restoration 4k77 based on a 35mm IB technicolor film scan. The amount of work fans do to restore work they care about more than the corporate owners is always both amazing and heartwarming.
Still some cropping and way too much DNR, but not as bad as the 1080p BDs indeed. Some people recommend it over the HDTV source (which was a bitstarved WMV3 encode) for its better handling of action sequences (i.e. without horrible macroblocking).
BD: http://comp.judging.it/content/Koukaku%20Kidoutai/1080p-3/BD...
HDTV: http://comp.judging.it/content/Koukaku%20Kidoutai/1080p-3/Ju...