wabid said:

Respectfully I disagree with you on all counts. I see the difference and so do others. These releases need to be kept "archival grade" IMHO, you can never get back what is lost.

Then it should be released as a 1080p 40gb mpeg2, or even some lossless codec. Pretending a 720p 15gb mp4 is archival grade is silly.

You being able to see the difference is more placebo than anything. You really do need comparison software to see the difference. The "tiny faction" is people who can actually see a difference, although plenty claim to.

If an archival grade copy is important Harmy should release a HUGE lossless encode into the wild. It is overkill for 99.99% of use cases, but just having access to it benefits many people. If it were 1080p, then yes, 15 gigs would be necessary, but since 720p is half the resolution, 8 is plenty.

That's not strictly true - while I myself must admit to see little difference here between the AVCHD and the MKV, it really depends on the size of screen you're watching it on and of course the viewing distance - there is a clear difference between a 16GB 1080p and a full BD encode - while the 16GB version is likely to look great, the BD will look even better, especially with grainy film, because grain is hard to compress, so it stands to reason that with half the resolution, you need half the size - that is 8GB for very good quality, 15-20GB for retail BD quality compression-vise. A 40GB 1080p would of course be pointless, since I've been working at 720p from step one, so it would have to be an upscale, but I don't think BD25 size is an overkill for 720p (the mkv release is a BD25 size once you add lossless audio, menus and some extras).