Currently Watching: Dragon Ball Kai

Me and my roommates started watching Dragon Ball Kai (subbed of course). I remember watching Dragon Ball (coincided with my only bought of early childhood depression) and Dragon Ball Kai as a preteen, and gloating over how the Philippines got to enjoy the DB/DBZ craze way before the US did.

Segue - Given this, allow me to elaborate on how I start following a new anime series:

1. Hearsay leads to the research phase, mainly in the form of AniDB
2. Anidb provides one with a good selection of casual reviews, but more importantly, provides a great list of all the current subbers of the series, including the episode progress, and subtitle/video encoding quality rating and comment system.
3. Once I have picked the best, its torrent time! I first try to find the fansub's homepage, if any, to find a consolidated torrent list. If unavailable, then its either Nyaatorrents, Isohunt, or Demonoid.

So what is Dragon Ball Kai?

Quoted from the Dragon Ball Wiki:

Dragon Ball Z Kai (known in Japan as Dragon Ball Kai, ドラゴンボール改　「カイ」; Doragon Boru Kai; Lit. Dragon Ball Revised) is an anime series that is a high-definition remaster and recut of Dragon Ball Z done for its 20th Anniversary.

The series is being extensively "refreshed" for Japanese television. This is not a new animation, but rather a remastered edit that runs through certain events of Dragon Ball Z. Part of this is reformatting and extending the picture to 16:9 Widescreen. Through digital processing, the image is made vibrant. All the grime, damage and noise remaining on the "Z" film is removed, making the image much clearer in high-definition.
New ending credits with new animations of Dodoria and Zarbon (top left), The Ginyu Force (top right), Frieza (center left), Raditz (center right), and Vegeta and Nappa (bottom left).

Toei Animation stated that the Dragon Ball Kai episodes would be edited to more closely follow Akira Toriyama's original story in the manga, resulting in a faster moving story, and to remove any damaged frames.^[7] Dragon Ball Kai will minimize the filler material produced for Dragon Ball Z's original production run. On the already broadcast episodes, only a few minutes of filler material with no impact to the story have been left in, probably to help the chapter reach its full 20 min, and Gregory's appearance at King Kai's planet, who wasn't present in the manga. A rumor had gone around from the first announcement of Kai that the episode could would be "Around 100 Episodes". The rumor was confirmed when Happinet (The Japanese company releasing the series on DVD and Blu-ray) announced the Japanese DVD and Blu-ray release would have an end point of "99 Episodes (tentative)" meaning the current planned and announced episode count will end at 99, however they expect that count may change slightly before they actually get there.^[8]

 From viewing the first 40 episodes, I can indeed confirm (and so do my flatmates!) that the pacing is indeed a marked improvement from the original. It really paid off to follow the original manga pacing, (as intended by the creator) reducing the episode count from 291 to 100 .  I'm currently at the Frieza saga (episode 40-ish), which is dragging a little (forgivable, since he was almost the final villain in the manga). I can't wait to experience that innocent wonder and awe when Son Goku first achieved Super Saiyan. Kamehameha!

PS: The english fansub to get for this one is SD & Taka. Video quality is excellent at 720 (1280 x 720), and sub translation is supposedly above average, although they are a bit behind on the episodes (54 out of 64 released). Get them here. (Matroska .MKV ones have the best quality)

Source: http://pinoyskepticuae.blogspot.com/2010/07/currently-watching-dragon-ball-kai.html