Personally this is my favorite magical-girl anime after "Pretty Samy" . . .
 . . . only by a tiny margin.

It is everything that the critics say it is . . .
 . . . in a word . . .
"Wonderful"

The fans at AniDB and ANN rate this show a solid 8 & 7.9

This started out as a serial story appearing in one of the many Japanese magazines/comics/manga in 1996 and resulting graphic-novels/tankoubon.
Around 1998 Cardcaptor Sakura was animated and broadcast on NHK.

IT WAS WILDLY POPULAR in Japan,
so much so that the most popular name for new-born girls over the next few years was "Sakura" or 桜.
Not too much later Nelvana acquired the licensing rights for the English language version.
They felt it was necessary to change a few things around to make the anime easier to sell to American broadcasters.
The resulting Cardcaptors was initially modestly received but the changes that had been done to the series including renaming many of the characters, rearranging the episodic order and even omitting various scenes as well as entire episodes was met with disappointment and complaints.
I remember personally finding numerous websites that complained about the changes.

There was even a webmaster that paid for advertising to get people to her website to malign "Cardcaptors".
After the first season of Cardcaptors the popularity waned and that particular version was never really finished.
Nelvana & Pioneer {now Geneon} did an almost simultaneous release of Cardcaptors & the uncut/unedited/subtitled Cardcaptor Sakura.
It was interesting to see the sales figures at the e-merchants like Amazon and others that would post them.
It seemed that Cardcaptor Sakura out sold Cardcaptors sometimes by a margin of more than 10 to 1.
{A lesson not entirely lost on domestic distributors.}

The DVDs of both versions are out of print but still available . . . scarce collector's items . . .
AND VERY EXPENSIVE.
There are fans of both series.

Today there are still calendars, figurines and all manner of Cardcaptor Sakura goods that are available but are increasingly hard to come by.
CLAMP has also started a new story about Sakura & Shouran in a different dimension/world called "Tsubasa".

Quite a notable accomplishment for a girl named "Cherry"

The Tankoubon/Graphic novels are still available in the USA as well as Japan.

Unfortunately the Artbooks seem to be out of print both in Japan and the USA.
At this writing  "The Art of Cardcaptor Sakura #3" is still available at Amazon and various close-out/clearance book stores but not for much longer.
The earlier books as well as the illustration books for the Anime/cartoon can be had at some of the various used book stores.
The original Japanese Artbooks are almost impossible to come by . . . but if you do a little searching you might just get lucky.

Practically all the Desktop Wallpaper images have been altered by cropping, resizing, retouching and refinishing . . . This is not meant to detract or alter the original artistic intent or diminish the work performed by the original artists.