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The US Anchor Bay and Italian 01 Distribution releases are 16:9 anamorphic widescreen, whereas both the Australian Rainbow Products and German MIB releases are 4:3 open-matte, although framed slightly differently.
The US and Italian transfers are of excellent quality that look similar but show intriguing differences when one looks at minute details. During playback the Italian disc seems to show more grain (that's a good thing because it means that detail hasn't been lost to filtering) but in busy frames there are compression artifacts that give an illusion of grain; so sometimes there's real grain (good), other times only the appearance of grain. It's not clear which is which unless one zooms in to look at the detail of individual frames. I'd love to see the Italian transfer on a dual-layer disc where a higher bitrate could be used to preserve the real film grain. Combined with the 20% greater vertical resolution of PAL over NTSC that would almost certainly be the best quality presentation until a high-def release comes along.
All four releases use a single-layer disc (or one layer of a dual-layer disc in the case of MIB) but the video quality of the Anchor Bay and 01 Distribution releases is excellent, dramatically better than the other two; with a brighter transfer that isn't too bright and doesn't suffer from obvious compression artifacts although details may be a bit softer on the US disc, probably as a result of the film grain being more filtered. The Rainbow Products release has ugly compression artifacts and two sections of the movie have the video fields out of phase (see below for details of this). The MIB transfer falls in the middle; it doesn't have the compression artifacts but it does have a strange vertical line pattern that's noticeable for most of the movie.
The Anchor Bay transfer is one of the best in my DVD collection but sadly the Rainbow Products is one of the worst. Form your own opinion by studying these frame captures.
The Rainbow DVD has a problem with video field phase that makes it irritating to watch on a progressive scan display because all fast motion shows ghosting — a comb effect at the edges of moving objects. The first five Rainbow frames above have the problem, the last three do not; quality control should have rejected this transfer outright.
I found the extra information in the full-frame open-matte transfers of the MIB and Rainbow Products releases to be useful for identifying filming locations, and it did give a slightly different visual feel in some scenes, but the dark transfers impairs one's enjoyment of so many scenes that appear unnaturally dark that it's not worth suffering through when there are brighter transfers available.
One thing about the Anchor Bay and 01 Distribution transfers that must be mentioned is that while they're brighter, they aren't too bright. There are scenes where bright areas have detail that is more burnt-out than the other transfers, such as curtains in front of a window or lights on the street at night, but that's to be expected in a scene where the area of interest is significantly dimmer and has been properly exposed.
The German MIB release compared here is the one from the FSK 16 rated Angel Collection (also marked "neue version") not the FSK 18 "Special Uncut Version". However, in this set Angel is uncut, only Avenging Angel and Angel III have cuts.
The Italian release has one cut, apparently not for content, that removes the discussion about going to the morgue and the resulting grilling by Lt. Andrews. The resulting flow is smoother but it removes one of my favourite cute scenes where Angel wonders about "unclaimed bodies" and what happens to them.
Frame captures from the US Anchor Bay release are copyright 1983 The Angel Venture and are from The Angel Collection released in 2003.
Frame captures from the Italian 01 Distribution release are copyright 1983 The Angel Venture and are from Angel, catalogue number 00269, released in 2004.
Frame captures from the German MIB release are copyright 1983 The Angel Venture and are from The Angel Collection (the FSK 16 version, and marked "neue version") released in 2004.
Frame captures from the Australian Rainbow Products Limited release are copyright 1983 New World Pictures, Inc. and are from The Angel Collection (RGP3903) released in 2004.
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