Buy or Download?

ARE anime sold in video stores worth buying? In my opinion, definitely NOT!
Have you ever come across anime that offer food subtitling? Apart from those that are imported from the United States, I can’t think of any anime that have good subtitles.
Most are directly translated from Chinese to English and Bahasa Malaysia so you might not understand what it really means in Japanese; sometimes the subtitles even give the wrong meaning. Names, definitions, items, and places are the common areas in which there are mustakes. And the poor English and Bahasa Malaysia really annoys me, too.
It’s so bad that I wonder whether these so-called licensed distributors are actually licensed by the official distributors in Japan.
In Singapore, where you can find anime with good subtitles, the licensed distributors are well-known unlike those in Malaysia. Here, there seem to be far too many distributors that I have never heard of.
And anyway, how do we know the anime we buy from video stores are originals? Yes, they have stickers labeling them as originals. But how do you define original? Original according to criteria in Malaysia or Japan?
A complete set of one anime can cost 35,000 Yen (RM 1,300) in Japan. In Malaysia, some stores sell such sets for between RM 50 and RM 150, which is very suspicious.
A few years back I heard about an anime fan who forked out thousands of ringgit to buy original anime from the United States. Some of us laughed at her stupidity then. Now, however, we admire her for supporting the licensed US distributors that offer good English subtitles. But not many of us would be willing to part with that much money for a hobby.
So, what should we do? Buy from the stores with poor subtitles or download from the Internet? The latter is cheaper and the subtitling by the fan-subtitlers is quite impressive.
This is something that we need to discuss further in the forums.