Hello;

I'm a fan of the works of Hayao Miyazaki. I've collected several of the Japanese Region 2 DVD's of his films. I'm also a video producer. I use the production monitor in my editing setup to watch these DVD's because it has a switch for showing 16:9 DVD widescreen.

I recently got the Region 1 Castle in the Sky. At the end of the business day, I popped it into the DVD player...

...and was shocked to see annoyingly visible animated white specks in most of the scenes.

This crud is barely visible in the Region 2 Japanese version of Castle in the Sky (Tenkuu no Shiro Rapyuta). In fact, I'd never noticed the dirt before, until the Region 1 disk showed me where to look.

I put together a website on the differences in images quakity of these two versions of Castle. With the help of a friend, there's some more information on differences in image quality for Kiki's Delivery Service/Majo no Takkyubin and for Spirited Away/Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi.

Sorry, the website has some MONSTER pages. We couldn't use a lossy image file format like .jpg -- we had to go with .png You'll see exactly what we found, but each picture is around a half meg...

Here is the URL:
http://www.wjsavage.com/web/R1DVD/comparisons_of_studio_ghibli_r1.htm

Here's the URL for a QuickTime movie that clearly shows the differences in quality between the R1 and R2 Castle in the Sky. You'll have to download the movie from this page. It's about 5 Megabytes.
http://www.wjsavage.com/web/R1DVD/dirt_movie.htm