UK anime shop?

[nemarious]

Hey, folks, I only go into anime in the past few months after I was lent a load of shows from a friend from University.

To cut a long story short, as I live in the UK I'm finding it pretty hard to find decent prices for the stuff I like and want to own myself, after all, I can't just keep my friends discs forever.

The ones I've checked that have a decent selection are the obvious ones (play.com, amazon.co.uk, forbiddenplanet.com) and whilst the choice is encouraging, I'm not necessarily sure I'm getting an optimum price.

I know this is a mostly American forum, of course, but I was just wondering if there were any other Brits, or anybody even, that knew a reliable site selling DVDs that would work in the UK. Whether that be all the sell or a portion is irrelevant, I'm just looking for alternatives to the big three above.

Thanks in advance for any and all help

[† RazorDan]

Well I live in Birmingham and I usually go on forbidden planet. Guess you could try even eBay, it'd probably be cheaper.

[nemarious]

Hey, thanks for the reply. The local Forbidden Planet near me closed a year or so ago, so I'm pretty much stuck with online. I've got Amazon.co.uk, play.com, forbiddenplanet.com and hmv all as bookmarks.

It's not like I've got any spare cash at the moment to buy anything anyway but it would seem play or amazon will most likely be the cheapest (using Deathnote complete boxset as a method of comparing prices they both have it for £27) whereas others are more expensive with HMV and Forbidden Planet both listing £40 as a price.

Just thought I'd ask the more experienced anime watchers if there were any alternatives aside from the obvious. It would seem not. I found a small shop in the market near me but they only seem to stock manga which is a shame.

[nemarious]

Hey, guys, I found these two sites whilst shopping for some stuff via google shopping.

http://www.fareastvision.com/

http://www.otakucastle.com/

They may well be run by the same company as their layouts are exactly the same.

I cannot comment on their service, I haven't used either of them for anything yet so bear that in mind if you do. If you do decide to use them, could you post here so that other people will know about them.

The good stuff from what I've seen after a quick browse through them is that their prices are indeed cheap. I said in my previous post that amazon and play.com had Death Note complete collection for £27, well, these guys are both offering it for £26.

Another good point is that they mostly seem to offer only region 0 discs. For those that don't know, this should mean that they will play anywhere in the world. For more information go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd_region.

The last good thing about these sites is that they offer prices in US$, CA$, AU$, GBP and EUR, all you need to do is change a little selection box that is always near the top left of the site and it gives you the price in that currency. If you're clever about it then, you can fiddle with the exchange rate. For example, at the time of writing this, £26 is around $42.39 but fareastvision are selling Death note complete for $39.49, so less than the conversion rate. If I convert that back to pounds its only £24.22, so as you can see I've already reduced the price by close to £2.

So they seem to be okay sites but just to reiterate, I have NOT used them before I cannot comment on what their service is like. They claim to have been around for ten years which, whilst explaining the outdated looks of their sites cannot be proven either way. It's on your own head, or wallet, if you use them and they turn out to be unreliable.