Blu-ray/DVD/Steelbook Plastic Box Protectors for your Anime Collection

[Girls With Guns]

There are a couple threads here on blu-ray.com that deal with products to provide external protection for your Blu-rays, DVDs and Steelbooks when storing them on your media shelves, to alleviate shelf wear, avoid oily fingerprints, repell splashed liquids, and simply keep them in as pristine condition as possible. This thread is intended to go into detail on a specific protection - clear plastic box protectors - and the sizes available anyone here in the anime forum finds that will fit specific packaging for anime releases.

Background: Many Japanese anime releases, especially Limited Editon Box sets, already come prepackaged inside re-closable or re-sealable plastic bags. On the other hand, almost all domestic anime in the U.S. is sealed at the factory in flimsy shrink wrap plastic, which is more damaging to the packaging than anything because of the tight shrink-to-fit aspect of it - and is not really re-usable once opened or removed. There are aftermarket re-sealable OPP bags available for disc media, but I find them to be very thin (1 or 1.5 mil), easily damaged, and frustrating to get media cases into. The sticky seal strip on the flaps of those bags are rather cumbersome to work with once the bag is re-opened, as they can attach themselves to the outside of your collectible packaging when inserting the anime back into the bags, potentially damaging the nice finish you're trying to protect in the first place. Also, plastic bags have unsightly corner flaps that tend to stick out helter-skelter when lined up on your media shelf, and the bag seams or creases run right down the middle of the case spine - so I'm not overly excited with their overall appearance on the shelf.

As a more rugged and much more attractive protection than loose-fitting bags, there are also Steelbook Protectors available which are made of a clear, stiff but flexible, acid-free, archive grade 12 mil P.E.T. (polyethylene terephthalate), which is the same plastic material water and soda bottles are made of. These are what I wish to examine in detail in this thread. Over the past few months I have discovered sources for these protectors not just for Steelbooks, but for numerous sizes that fit Blu-ray and DVD cases very nicely, with and without slipcovers, and even ones to fit slightly larger-dimensioned side-load slipboxes such as those from Aniplex of America.

Many people use protectors from the UK-based Steelbookcentral.com; these are fairly popular, and come in various sizes for different sized steelbooks - and there are a few other sources for steelbook protectors found on the web. If anyone deals with Steelbookcentral or one of these other sources already, I'd like to ask you to contribute the sizing information for the protectors as it relates to what anime packaging it fits well, and even some photos if possible. Let's help everyone here in obtaining the best protection possible for for their valuable anime collections!