It is an upscale, but an upscale in the way that Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is an upscale. It was animated at less than 1080p resolution. In fact, in comparison to the DVDs, there is no actual extra detail in the picture per se, You won't be spotting anything new in the image. But rather than opt for an SD re-master, which is what Funimation have done for many of their shows, creating the Blu-rays from the same source material from which they created the DVDs, the Japanese studios went back to scratch with Black Lagoon and worked from the original animation, not the HD CAM tapes on which they sold the show abroad and to the TV stations. As a result, Black Lagoon's image looks amazing, with no visible compression, the full colour range that Blu-ray has to offer, and native 24 frames per second progressive playback. In that respect, comparing the Blu-ray to the DVD is like comparing night to day.