Reliability about Buying on Amazon? (A bootleg topic)
 

Hey all, I'm thinking about buying the complete series of Air (tv) on amazon from a 3rd party seller. I'm interested to know your opinions in terms of reliability AKA not buying a bootleg copy of anime.

The seller told me the DVD region is 1 and that the box art is different than the one posted.

This is the box art that was shown:



This is the art I'm expecting, since he said it's gonna be different:



What are your opinions about buying on amazon?

I've read up on how to distinguish bootlegs from official stuff, so I feel pretty confident about that.

I bought 2 other complete collections through 3rd party amazon (Mushishi and FLCL) and I'm secure in saying they are official.

Has anyone had any trouble with these types of things?

Does he have a lot of positive reviews? I rarely (in fact, never) have issues buying things through third party vendors on Amazon, whether it's an individual or a full-blown business.

That said, I don't buy things from vendors who have no to hardly any ratings/reviews.

He does have a good rating, 99%. And the 1% is due to some "neutral" ratings. So a bootleg thing would probably be a "negative" rating.

He does sell other DVDS, some of them going for a few dollars though...while others are pretty expensive, 100's of dollars. So I'm not sure if he's just got some awesome stuff and some really old or bad stuff, or if the old/bad stuff is fake.

Oh, I don't worry my head over how some of the vendors I buy things from got their hands on the goods. :heh: I imagine both ebay and Amazon's third party sellers are possibly the world's largest black markets on the globe with some of the things I've managed to buy at the prices I got. :p

Now, if I'm hearing you right, you're concerned that it may be a bootleg, hence having the wrong cover art. Why not ask him to take a photo of the actual box and send it to you. If he refuses, then I'd be suspicious. In his possible defense, it's very common for third party vendors to just slap an image up there from google search, rather than go through the trouble of photographing their item and putting that image up instead. So, the image he put up isn't necessarily indicative of anything. Just looks much better than what you'd take with your digital camera. But, again, if he refuses to take an actual picture of the goods to send to you privately...well, that's a red flag in my book.

I gotcha creb, I'll contact him and ask him for that information. Thanks for the suggestion!

I'm also wondering why are there 13 episodes of this show but the DVDs only have episodes 1-12. That's a little sketchy to me..

It could be the artbox from ADV's release of Air a few years ago

I contacted the seller. He gave me the details, said it's a region 1 DVD with Japanese + English audio (no Chinese subs). He told me he supports anime and assured me his copy is not a bootleg (he used anime terms too, so I think it's safe to assume he's a dedicated anime fan). He actually said the different box art thing was a typo.

Thanks everybody here for your support! :)

From a couple searches, they are both FUNimation's releases, just apparently they switched art at some point:


First: http://www.mania.com/aodvb/showthread.php?t=90676
Second: http://www.rightstuf.com/cgi-bin/cat...em/86801/4/0/0

Also, from the second release: Contains episodes 1-12 plus the 2-part Air in Summer OVA special.

A high episode count per disc is often also a good indication that an item is bootlegged. If there's a single disc with all the episodes on it, for instance, it's pretty likely that's bootlegged. A legitimate twelve-episode series probably comes on three or four discs depending on extras.

I approach any of the Amazon "third party members" very warily... they're just people using Amazon as a store front like the Google or Yahoo stores and I'm not really confident how well Amazon polices their "partners".

I don't know about Amazon, but I know that good ratings on Ebay means nothing. A good load of those reviews were posted by people who don't even realize they were tricked.

I bought Pokemon Emerald once on Amazon, and it turned out fine though.

Well... can anyone find a more reliable and cheaper place to get Ikaruga? I mean, I find it here at Amazon, but... I'm still hesitant to buy. That's coupled with the hesitation to buy games at all. I am generally content with playing a few other games; but I've been wanting this now-hard-to-find one.

You could get Ikaruga on Xbox Live, if you simply want to play the game and not for collection purposes.