Video:

VHS rip. Some tape glitches, some color blur and slightly unsharp picture. And there's too much brightness and contrast when the screen shows white backgrounds, so you have to reduce brightness and contrast on your TV when watching this. There's also some slight pixelation, but although MAC squeezed the 5 disc MI set onto 4 discs, I only noticed bad compression artifacts once in a short scene with fast cuts (in the Open Air Concert episode). EDIT: I found another AC-MAC set that is ripped from the MI set, but put onto fewer disks (Kodomo no Omocha). This set has the same problems with the high contrast and brightness. I think this is a problem caused by AC-MAC's reencoding.

Audio:

Nothing to complain about on my simple stereo TV, although it's probably not the usual DVD quality.

Subtitle:

Nice subs. Some very few lines missing. Some few timing issues, but they always catch up within a few lines. Names are right (except for one episode where they called Hikari = Arei), but often there's the last name in the subs when the audio says the first name (and vice versa). There are some small grammar errors now and then, like wrong word forms and tenses and mixing up genders or I/you. And they definetely are very liberal in translating stuff (like when a character says "betsu ni" = nothing special, the subs would say "I only remembered something strange"), so the subs do not always excactly reflect what is being said. But hey, that's the case with a lot of professional subs, too. My guess is, that these are HK originals, and if they are, they are very good compared to the most other HK original subs.

Comment:

As said before, this is a rip of the MI set, but squeezed onto 4 discs instead of 5. EDIT: Because of the video problem mentioned above I would suggest to pay the money for the additional disc and get the MI set. A very good anime. Baseball plus a dose of romance. I liked it, although I don't know much about baseball. Too bad that the series was cancelled at episode 41 (thus only reaching 1/3 of the manga). I would have wanted to watch more of it. Would Hideo and Hiro have met at the Koshien? Which team would have won? Still, even with this open ending, I can HIGHLY RECOMMEND this anime. Equipment used: Sony DVP-NS 300 codefree PAL player, Kenwood DVF-3080 PAL player, cheap Grundig 27" PAL stereo TV