I think I have collected anime in nearly every home video format that it's been distributed on: VHS, LaserDisc, Video CD, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, the UMD format used by the PSP, and maybe even a couple of others I missed. No VHD, although there was a time once when I would have been sorely tempted to track down a player and some discs just to have the bragging rights.
Now we have an all-new format on the horizon — the 4K resolution Ultra HD Blu-Ray Disc (UHD BD), with four times the picture size of BD and resolution comparable to the digital projection systems used in theaters. Gadget lover that I may be, I'm not holding my breath for it. UHD BD does have some benefits, but they're only going to apply to a minimal subsection of the anime content out there right now. Until there's enough 4K content to matter, the most immediately useful features it offers are creative new ways to repackage existing content.
The bigger picture
Most of why UHD BD seems to have been invented in the first place was to give the next generation of 4K TVs something to do, other than play the odd bit of Netflix content. The format functions mainly as a way to sell, all over again, the newest A-list Hollywood releases and some select catalog titles — first to the early adopters and then later, after prices fall, to people entering for the first time the market for a new TV and a media player. The same strategy applied to Blu-ray in the first place, so ostensibly it can be applied all over again.
Note that I don't think highly of this strategy or even how feasible it is, only that it's what seems to be at play here. New consumers come into the home electronics market all the time, making it easy to sell them on whatever the next generation of technology is. That said, the new generation of players also tend to be backwards compatible with the older software, so early adopters feel less pressure to throw out existing video titles until those discs are actually replaced one-for-one.
Ultra-HD's biggest asset — four times the resolution of standard HD — is something that anime can only take advantage of under specific conditions. For one, you need to have source material that's at least native 4K resolution; otherwise, you're forced to upscale an existing master. Standard HD upscaled to 4K isn't likely to look anywhere nearly as wretched as standard-def upscaled to HD (FLCL, ahem), but it's still not ideal. And of the existing anime content out there, it's likely that the only things available in 4K would either be a) the most recent spate of shows — and I doubt most of them are even being produced in 4K yet; b) older material shot on film that can be scanned at 4K (assuming anyone wants to bother doing so); c) material produced for theatrical release (assuming again it was produced with a 4K master).
That leaves us with, on the face of it, only a few flagship titles — the AKIRAs, the Disney-distributed Studio Ghibli releases, maybe a maverick item like Tragedy of Belladonna that happened to receive a brand-new 4K restoration, and so on. Those are actually the kinds of high-profile titles that are a good fit for the introduction of a new format. But 4K isn't yet a complement to the majority of current TV-grade anime production. It's possible by the time Ultra-HD enters mainstream use, TV anime production will have scaled up to 4K, but again that would only be for the latest-and-greatest shows out there.
There's a chance earlier shows could be retooled for 4K without simply upsampling an HD master. A show like Knights of Sidonia, an all-digital production rendered using 3D CGI techniques, could conceivably be regenerated in 4K from its original source material, but it's an open question who would foot the bill for such a project, or whether it would be seen as worthy of the investment. (Knights was distributed Stateside by Netflix, a service that touts its 4K-native content roster as a selling point, but the show wasn't available in 4K when it debuted on Netflix, so I'm not inclined to think it would be reworked for that format.)
Old wine in new(er) bottles
All this aside, there are ways I think anime could benefit from 4K video and UHD BD as a delivery vehicle. Both involve using the existing masters — the 1080p or even 480p masters — but using the higher storage capacity and better compression algorithms available in the new format as a way to repackage and redeliver that material.
One common, if minor, complaint about anime on BD is how the compression used for BD can sometimes produce artifacts in the kinds of images commonly seen in anime. Areas of solid color with subtle gradations often break up into coarse bands. The H.265 codec for UHD BD, though, is said to provide compression that minimizes such issues. To that end, even if there's no 4K master available for a title, an existing 1080p master could be compressed using H.265 and look that much better -- higher color depth, less artifacts — and use the same or less space it did when compressed for conventional BD.
This leads into advantage #2. The greater amount of storage space available on a single UHD BD (66 GB, as opposed to a conventional BD's 50 GB) disc means you could pack that many more 1080p episodes of a show onto a single disc, and again without compromising quality. A few video distributors have flirted with something along these lines right now — e.g., the Discotek Media Blu-ray Disc edition of Samurai Pizza Cats. The content on the disc is standard-def, but a single Blu-ray Disc can hold a little over five times what a single DVD can hold, meaning an entire season's worth of DVD content can be packed onto a single BD with little or no loss in quality.
When Blu-ray Disc first appeared, I was excited about the possibility of niche material being brought to the format: anime, films from the Criterion collection, maverick distributors like Arrow or Synapse Films. It took time, but those things did happen, and what helped make it easier was how many existing backend production pipelines for home video already used HD as a mastering medium. 4K can't yet provide the same kind of benefit until there's enough existing native-resolution material for it to matter, and that's not happening anytime soon.
If anime does come to UHD BD, my guess it'll be be because the format provides new ways to deliver us existing content with more episodes per disc and fewer compression issues. It won't be because the majority of it makes use of a bigger picture. At least, not yet.
