A very good question indeed. I personally started with TV but lately I have been breeding SV too and I find that they are relatively the same. It is the actual culling that makes the differences between the two. I watched my friends who are only into SV cull their fish, and oddly enough the fish that they cull are exactly what I usually look for in fish to keep for my topview breeding. And vice versa for the SV cull outs as well.

Many of the breeders, including myself, have started a while back to include topview ranchu in the SV line breeding. Japanese TVR have a lot of nice characteristics which will be nice to include in SV, don't you think.

When you look at them from breeding perspective they are both exactly the same. However, the way you keep TV and SV are totally different. For SVR, you will hardly ever look at the fish from the topview perspective and you have far fewer factors to entertain. TVRs are a lot more tricky.

I hope that this will not make you even more confuse. You can tell a lot by just looking at the fish. I find that a good topview are usually a rather good sideview, too. But in the opposite direction, I have yet to find a nice sideview fish that could compete directly with a nice TV ranchu.

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