[Hawkeye]

Okay over the past year I had noticed that certain companys have poped up such as Amazon and Blockbuster have been offering a DVD rentel service by Post, This new service clearly increase their libarary of items to rent. Including Anime which is near impossible to find in a normal rentel store, apart from one or two such as Ghost in the Shell or Akira movies.

What I'm asking is this, Has anyone useds this service to rent anime? The reason being for 5.99 a month for 3 DVD's [Amazon, will be looking at other services] seems like a great idea, The reason being that most of the anime I buy I watch once and it enters my stock pile. I want to see if anyone else uses this kind of service and what their opinion of it is like? Are there any services to stay away from?

As I have heard from sources that some users are blacklisted if they rent alot more then usually, E.g. their put at the back of the waiting lists for their selection and so forth.....

[Jay]

I used to rent anime from blockbuster all the time. With their outragously long return policy, and growing selection of anime (depends on the location), you can see a lot more and pay a lot less as apposed to buying (as i'm sure you would assume). Since i've seen most of what they now have to offer at my local store, i don't rent anime as often, except for when they get in something new.

The only thing i'd watch out for is their tendancy to have incomplete sets. If you don't check thoroughly, and rent the first half of a series, then go to get the next half and they don't have one (god knows why), its really irritating. When i rented gits for the first time, i thought there was just 6 volumes, since thats what blockbuster had, but then it turned out they just didn't have 7, which i learned to late

[Hawkeye]

True I surposes, you have to really be aware of what there is too rent, Heck I wish I could rent from an American rentel company

[Lynk Former]

After seeing BGC2040 on TV I started renting any anime I could find at my local blockbuster... which wasn't much and it was VHS... after a few vids I started buying anime DVDs and haven't needed to rent anime since.

[Hawkeye]

I can see you point there, but that was then... You could proberbly rent Anime from a Mail service in Austrilia as well. I mean what do you do with you DVD's once you watched them?

[Lynk Former]

Actually thanks to Madman Entertainment, anime DVDs are readily available to rent from local videostores, no need for any mail service at all. Plus that kind of thing doesn't work down here in Australia, people don't like it.

What do I do with my DVDs once I watch em? Well I watch the english version... and the japanese version and then there's the extras... and then it sits there on my DVD rack and I watch something else... and then some time later I go and pick up that anime from my DVD rack and say "hey this was cool, let's watch it again." The advantage of owning anime DVDs? You own anime DVDs. All of the anime I want to watch are all there, I have my own private library of DVDs and if there's something I don't have, I go out and buy it and then I have it

[Hawkeye]

I surposes so... But it still means that you have to spend alot of your money on buying theses DVD's, Me I just really watch them once in both Dub's... then I'm onto the next one....

[Lynk Former]

Well I do have the money to spend. Plus I never watching anything just once... unless it really did suck lol.

[Hawkeye]

How much do you earn per hour to make that type of money......

I wish I had that type of money, mind you I spend it more on Manga then Anime, but this would give me a chance to examine more anime then I normally would.

[Lynk Former]

Well the recommended retail price of anime DVDs are 30AUD, but you can get em for 25AUD and older ones for 20AUD and less. (30AUD = 22USD)

Madman releases anime once a month (cept for the last two months) so I save up my cash and buy on average about 5-6 items a month. Note items doesn't mean number of discs, sometimes I buy entire collections.

[FirestarterCL]

Hey Lynk, I smell a new poll question for the main page.

I don't rent either, the last thing I rented was Need for Speed 3 for Playstation... when it came out. I like to own things, so I buy all of my anime. Plus, its nice to just be able to pull a show off the shelf and watch it f I ever get the urge.

I make sure to get my anime as cheap as possible too. I rarely pay more than 50% percent of the retail price. The only time I pay more is if I REALLY want a show (like Ghost in the Shell:SAC and Samurai 7) and even then, I'll shop around for the best price.

[darktruth]

I used to rent anime too before I started buying them (with the exception of BGC Tokyo 2040 which I bought the individual DVD volumes after seeing it on SBS). I remember the first was Samurai X Trust & Betrayal which was such a good choice leading me to buy the DVD. Personally I rented anime to test it out if it was good enough to buy but I'm sure that's part of the point of renting anyway.

After Samurai X I continued to rent Rurouni Kenshin tv series on VHS until volume 10 after that I continued on with the DVD's, my local VideoEzy was still kinda limited on animes available for rent at the time so I tried out other animes like Excel Saga, Chobits, Ninja Scroll Resurrection, Voices of a Distant Star and Tokyo Babylon. Out of those list so far, the only one I actually went out and bought after renting was Voices of a Distant Star.

I haven't rented any animes for years now cos right now I'm focusing on buying the Madman releases of animes that I downloaded awhile ago (Fumoffu, Midori no Hibi, etc) and also partly cos I used my older sister's account to rent in the first place lol XD.

[Hawkeye]

God for shaken... now I'm seeing the down side to DVD renting posting, you have no choice on which of your selection they send you. The Dim-Wads have sent me Vol 2 and 3 of Tenchi Muyo completely missing out VOL ONE in the line up. God For Shaken D**KS....

[tai]

if the anime is there, i rent it.

at my local rental place theres some dragonball/z/gt, spirited away, appleseed, and samurai champloo vol 5. theres also a bunch of other kids anime like hamtaro, hello kitty, kimba the white lion, yu-gi-oh, duel masters, poke'mon too.

if theres some anime in the new release section i'll grab it as fast as i can. lol.

one of the library's i go to has a lil anime aswell (witch hunter robin vol 1, my neighbours the yamadas). s'pose it's a good thing because that's where the anime club meets. actully, if you poke around most librarys you find anime and manga. not a whole lot of it but it is there if you look.

EDIT: OMG i just went up to the video rental place again, they got in a bunch load of ghibili stuff!!!:

Howls Moving Castle
Pom Poko
Princess Mononoke
The Cat Returns

i also had to explain WTF an anime club was to the chick behind the counter lol.

[Hawkeye]

What no hitting on her?

[grilledcat]

The girl at my local Blockbuster gave recommendations on which anime to watch. Amusingly, none of them were stocked by the store...

That's why I rent most of my anime online. I really like animeforest since their distribution center is only a few hours from where I live and it takes a little less than week to get new titles after returning the old ones.