Kamisama no Memochou has above-average image quality. The native drawings were done in 720p, and then upscaled to 1080p using a good algorithm that barely produced any side effects. Colour banding is occasionally visible on the dark scenes but by no means severe. Since high-strength de-banding would damage some details like Alice's long, dark hair, and certain night scenes, we took a few protective measures accordingly when writing the script. This project is encoded in 720p for two reasons: first, 720p is enough to contain all the information about the native drawings; second, tractable upscaling algorithms can be reverted near-perfectly. The menus are native 1080p though, so the screenshots for them are still kept 1080p. One PV (from Vol.1) is pretty ugly-looking; it's made of some randomly-picked promotional videos for other Blu-rays (made by the same producer), hence having little value to this collection. We did not bother to include it.
The project was supposed to be completed by this point. Enola, who nominates this series, was a bit sad when knowing 720p was as high as this encode can go. He had watched a few other encodes for this same series on his UHD monitor, but blurry was always the experience, and there seemed to be no way out. Out of my own curiosity, and to fulfill his wish to watch a UHD version on a UHD monitor, we experimented with a neural network upscaling algorithm and made this 1440p version (exact 2x of the native 720p). We avoided those algorithms known for their subjective enhancement, sharpening or alike. Rather, we focused on mitigating any side effects so that the scenes won't be overly blurry or distorted. We then compared the output with what we got conventionally. The result is actually not that impressive: upscaling algorithms that are free of subjective enhancement, even with neural networks that consume so much power, show limited improvement compared the conventional upscaling methods - as long as the latter are properly used. The differences are not striking enough so that people can tell at a glance. Nevertheless, we've decided to release this version, for those who would like to try watching this series on a UHD display, but have difficulty enabling high-quality upscaling algorithm in the media player.
This is the upscaled 1440p version. For the ease of comparison, the screenshots for the source are upscaled to 1440p using Lanczos 3 algorithm to mimic typical play-back upscaling.