"First, nin74 made no mention of what country he was posting from at the start of the thread, and the fact that he was comparing an R2 DVD against an NTSC Laserdisc caused me to assume he was in an NTSC country."

Instead of assume things, ASK!

"I mean how could I have guessed he was in a PAL country when he was using an NTSC Laserdisc player???"

Maybe because there are multi standard on most TV's and Projectors? And that there are over 50 000 different NTSC LD titles and only around 5000 PAL LD titles so most in Europe had NTSC LD.

"People are much more likely to cross format lines with DVD rather than Laserdisc, so pardon the fuck outta me for assuming that NTSC was his native format."

First, bad language. Secondly, if you did know anything about LD you would have known the European history of NTSC/PAL players. So again, learn.


"Secondly, nin74 is obviously under the impression that "upconverting" actually produces more detail than is present on a DVD or Laserdisc, and that the screen you view a film on determines the resolution,"

I complete lie. Show me where I said that or take it back!

"yet at the same time he provides actual-size screen grabs for comparison purposes"

Why should I not use the actual size of the original signal?

"Nobody took me up on the MP3 "brain teaser", which I can only assume proves my point that nin74 wasn't actually aware of how missing detail could possibly be restored by this mysterious process he insists on calling "upconverting" rather than scaling, which is exactly what it is."

No, you are wrong again. I didn't said anything because any reasonable person see that I don't say the things you are stating I have said. You need to read better.

"yet when he just assumes he's getting a full 1080 lines of resolution simply because a Laserdisc image fills his screen, you don't even blink"

I think you should need to learn to READ! Show me where I have said that! You are just telling another lie after another to cover yor noobie mistake.


"Taking aim at mere semantics is a sure sign of someone who hasn't really thought the argument through, and the only thing they can dispute is what the proper term should be."

Are you for real? Another lie again. Why should I get crap because you don't know the right term.

"However, to ignore the analog haze present on most Laserdisc transfers (most evident in the "Repulsion" screen grab) is just as ridiculous. "

You have NOT said what kind of player you have used. You have said that it have not been a Elite model so I would guess you had a low budget player. And to make any general statement on the LD format on a crappy player is just...well, not serious.
The haze you say are in the Repulsion LD is GRAIN. And because of the faulty contrast and too low black level, the DVD is hiding it with other problems.

" I'm equal-opportunity here, so it's not like I'm trying to champion one format over another just for the sake of the format itself, which is exactly what nin74 seems to be doing."

Another lie again. Show me where I have said that! I have said that in some cases the LD version is better than the DVD. I also said that on newer blockbusters, the DVD version will be better in 99% of the times. How you can say I try to tell people LD is better than DVD are telling more about the problem you have to read and understand.


I know a thing or two about scaling, I have used a Crystalio video processor before (4000$). I know a thing or two about LD, as I have two Pioneer HLD-X0, one HLD-X9, Pioneer CLD-925 (best pal player), Pioneer CLD-315 and have had a Pioneer LD-S9, Pioneer R7G, Pioneer CLD-501, Pioneer DVL-909, Pioneer CLD-504.
I have had an Marquee 9500 LC CRT projector and a Sony VW-100 "ruby" projector. I also have a Panasonic RP-82 DVD player with SDI output.
I have also made a lot och comparision screenshots on other forums where I can prove what I say.
You have not show anything about your set-up, and you have clearly problems reading what others saying. So please, read again and give up saying things I have never said.

I'm hardly a newbie. First, learn to write coherent sentences in English. Second, learn that when a salesperson or the manual for a particular TV says it can get you 1080 lines from standard DVD via a mysterious process called "upconverting", you have to ask yourself where those extra lines are coming from (assuming you ever even knew that standard DVD is only 480 or 576 lines in the first place) instead of just taking everything as absolute gospel and bashing people for contradicting what you think you know. Third, learn to read my responses to your outrageous claims so you can actually understand and intelligently respond to what I've said, instead of just asking me what kind of gear I have as if only people with 50" TVs and projectors are qualified to judge picture quality (and from your own screengrabs yet), and realize that simply owning the latest hardware does NOT automatically make you an expert.

Sure, the language barrier is an obvious problem here, and that's not really your fault. However, your resistance to learning anything you didn't read in an equipment review or manual or have been told by a retail store employee who is much more concerned with salesmanship than technical knowledge is very much under your control, so please stop it.

Bye bye now.

Look, I am not talking about analog haze from my own Laserdisc player, because any haze I'd see on my setup could just as easily come from my old analog TV. I am, of course, referring to your very own screen grab. I hope your mention of "faulty contrast" and "too low black level" refers to the LD, because that is exactly what's wrong with it, in addition to the analog haze. If that were actual grain, as you suggest, it would be FAR WORSE on the DVD because the contrast is so much higher. If you knew anything about the telecine process, you'd know that if a film had that much obvious grain, it would not magically disappear in a DVD transfer, especially if they RAISED the contrast and black level instead of lowering it, which might indeed reduce the appearance of film grain. If film grain is gonna show up anywhere, it's more likely to be on a DVD, not a Laserdisc.

Furthermore, if you're trying to use the excuse that the LD looks just fine on your TV if you boost the black level and adjust the contrast to compensate (which I hope you're not), then you're blowing holes in your own argument. Picture quality should be rated on the pure signal coming out of the player, not what it looks like on your TV after you've tweaked a few settings.

Sheesh... and you call me a newbie.

dude get some laserdiscs and if you like them then get more. if you dont like them then just get dvds. I have no idea what you people are arguing about and there is no way in hell i am going to read all of that.

Mike, you need to let this go now. You are completely in the wrong, and you have no business accusing others of misreading your arguments when you are deliberately misreading their posts time and time again. You're setting up straw man arguments left and right in a desperate attempt to bolster your credibility, when the respectable thing to do would be to admit your mistake and defer to the greater experience of others who are merely trying to set the record straight.

My only agenda here is to correct the misinformation you're spreading, for the benefit of readers who may not know any better.

Where has he said either of these things? Find it and quote it. You can't, because he never said it. You've misread what was written, and then defiantly proclaim that everyone else is misreading you.

Artificially boosting contrast has the effect of crushing detail in bright parts of the frame, and will in fact mask grain (along with real picture detail) that should otherwise be visible.

Laserdisc and DVD are mastered for different black levels (7.5 IRE vs. 0 IRE). The two formats require separate calibration.

You accuse me of nit-picking your posts. I don't want to have to do this. You're forcing me to. Please just stop. Take a deep breath and re-read every post in this thread written by anyone other than yourself. Re-read each of them 2 or 3 times if you have to. In fact, I insist on it. Continue to take deep breaths while you do this. You'll be quite amazed at how shockingly you've misinterpreted almost everything you're railing against.

Mike, you did two new post with totaly wrong info again. Like Josh said, give it up. Try to learn more instead picking fights with people with more experience than you.

Does this guy know how to read?
I said:
"The haze you say are in the Repulsion LD is GRAIN. And because of the faulty contrast and too low black level, the DVD is hiding it with other problems"

Mike then answer:
"if you're trying to use the excuse that the LD looks just fine on your TV if you boost the black level and adjust the contrast to compensate (which I hope you're not), then you're blowing holes in your own argument. "

Mike Adams and nin74,

Both of you have made rude and attacking comments that really are not necessary. Any additional personal comments will result in this thread being closed.

I think it needs to be closed anyway, to be perfectly honest. I don't really need to keep defending myself here, and it's absurd to think I'm making up arguments just to ruin what for me has always been a very fun forum to post in. As has been the case with all the other points I've argued with nin74, if I've gotten the wrong impression about anything that's been said, it's far more likely to be because the thoughts were not expressed coherently than me not being able to read -- I've been reading quite well for many years now, thank you. I've done the best I could to decipher the posts directed at me, so I don't feel at all bad if I've misunderstood something. Rest assured that neither Josh nor "nin" has any idea how "big" my knowledge is regarding video, and it surprises me that they're so quick to attack someone they don't even know. I'm certainly more of a casual videophile than most people in this forum (meaning others are probably more serious about it than me), but having had a keen interest in the technical side for decades (and feeding that interest by actually doing research instead of just buying stuff), I know more than most. That being the case, I hate it when people get so caught up in marketing jargon that they actually argue with people in favor of what they've been told as opposed to actual facts. If that's not what's happening here, then I'll take my half of the blame, but no more.

I'm not a politician, and I don't enjoy arguing. I'm here to have fun and to "geek out" over DVDs with other collectors, so this whole "straw man" nonsense is completely inaccurate. I wasn't even a part of this thread until nin74 resurrected it and I made an innocent comment, which apparently sent nin74 into a frenzy. Of course I went into a frenzy at his response, so maybe something I said hit him the same way his comments hit me, and he just couldn't let what I said stand. I didn't really think I said anything all that inflammatory, but of course I guess he didn't either, although a lack of awareness of what was really being said is of course the crux of the argument here.

This quite literally became a "mine's bigger than yours" argument, which is really stupid considering that your knowledge of video hasn't a damn thing to do with what kind of equipment you have, how much you paid for it, or how often you upgrade. That kind of stuff has been repeatedly forced into the argument, and not by me. It's all well and good in a "post pictures of your HT" thread, but you can't base an argument on it.

Anyway, I'm fucking tired of the whole thing, so bash me all you want for whatever reasons you choose. I'm gonna go find a slipcovers thread and geek out about shiny o-shaped cardboard.

Yeah, "a lot" was both vague and a bit of an overstatement, but the point I was trying to make is that there's probably more difference betwen what comes out of a Laserdisc player and what actually shows up on a 1080-line HD screen than there would be between two different versions of the same film, regardless of format. With a DVD player, you can use component outputs to get a much better signal (I'm not talking PQ here, just basic signal from player to display device), and with Laserdisc, you're limited to S-Video, which is really considered a "legacy" option on hi-def sets, if present at all. What that means is that you're farther away from a direct connection with the hardware that displays the image than you'd be with other methods, even component.

The important (and little-known) point when talking about connecting LD players to an HD display is that even S-Video is beyond what you're actually getting off the disc. As has been pointed out, Laserdisc has been around since the late-'70s, so the idea of Y/C video (S-Video) wasn't something you found in consumer electronics back then. Hell, many early LD players didn't even have baseband video output, just RF-modulated 75-ohm F-connectors for TV hookup. That basically means that if you have a Laserdisc player with composite A/V outputs, you've got the purest connection to the inner workings of the player that you can get. The signal comes off the disc as a composite video signal and an audio signal, so even when S-Video connectors started appearing on Laserdisc players, you weren't really getting a true Y/C connection, just composite split to accomodate a new kind of connector people were starting to look for when buying video hardware -- in short, marketing nonsense. It's like having a mono audio output and sticking a Y-adapter in there to hook up left and right speakers -- sure, both speakers are playing, but it sure as hell ain't stereo, even though those little adapters were often marketed as "stereo splitters" (which some people might consider the "correct" term).

Rather than actually improving (which probably would have required the technology to be redesigned to the point where existing discs and/or players would have become obsolete), newer players just started implementing "comb filters" which basically tried to get some definition out of the composite analog mess that was coming off the disc (mind you, it was already much better than the composite analog mess that was coming off of VHS tape, but trying to compare it to digital formats like DVD is stretching things a bit... quite a bit). Salesmen at the time would have wasted no time in telling you that comb filters were a radical new design innovation that would actually give you more detail from your Laserdiscs. After all, why just sell to people who hadn't already bought a Laserdisc player, why not convince people with existing players to upgrade?

I'd be exactly the idiot I've been made out to be if I claimed that comb filters didn't actually improve the picture you saw on your TV, but what needs to be said (and isn't being said by anyone with a vested interested in promoting Laserdisc over DVD) is that LD players with comb filters are very much like "upconverting" DVD players. That is, sure, the resulting picture on your screen might (or might not) look better to you, but you aren't getting any extra detail, and worse yet, the comb filters don't actually know what the image is supposed to look like, so they only make arbitrary changes in the image that for most content should be an improvement. For this reason, pretending you get more detail out of your Laserdiscs because you have a player with the best comb filter ever designed is just plain foolish, and those players aren't any more HD-ready than earlier players, meaning that an HD display still has to process the signal to make it compatible with digital display hardware, and has much less to work with than a DVD player connected via component outputs. The difference between what the signal from a Laserdisc player hooked up to the S-Video jack has to go through as opposed to a component-connected DVD player is significant enough that it really isn't realistic to try and judge Laserdisc picture quality by running it through all manner of digitization and scaling.

My suggestion would be to find a common ground between DVD and Laserdisc. Get a really good standard-def TV or broadcast monitor, and look at the signal from each player in its native form, without a bunch of arbitrary fiddling around with the signal. If you decide that the DVD transfer of a film is so jacked-up that you can't enjoy it, and if all the limitations of the Laserdisc format don't bother you, by all means stick with that and use the DVD as a coaster or something.

Not little knowed, all people that still use LD know that the LD's are composite.



This is not right. You HAVE to have a comb filter of some sort, in the TV or LD player because the TV are not showing composite signal, but are showing an RGB signal. And different comb filter give different image. The best comb filters will give a lot better image with better colors, less noise and sharper image. For example, the Pioneer HLD-X9 and R7G have 3D motion adaptive filter that are some of the best on the market even today.




Yes, you do get better image and detail with better combfilter. That have been proven many times. And who have said that the signal are being more "HD-ready"? The simple thing is, the better, cleaner signal will give the best image after it's been upscaled to the resolution the display have. That's why I have the Pioneer HLD-X0 and HLD-X9 players, they give the best LD image from any player.



Off course component (or HDMI) is a better signal. But the signal will not be better than what's on the disc, like I have tried to say here. Burn an old VHS on a DVD and you will not have DVD quality.




I don't think anyone have said that one should only stick with LD. But what I and some other say is that LD can be good for those titles that are not on DVD and the ones the LD version look better. And the screenshots I have made are pure from the LD player and power DVD, so you see exactly how the image are on the disc's.

AFAIK with laserdisc, you're really limited to composite, because the S-Video signal is produced from the player's internal comb filter. But, since both composite and component are analog, are they really all that far removed from one another? Consider a laserdisc signal that is fed into a home theater PC equipped with an HDCP-compatible video card: the composite signal enters a capture card (like a Holo3Dgraph), where it is "combed", digitized, scaled, and deinterlaced; from that point on, it's ready for a digital display. How much less would be done with a component signal? It starts out as digital in the player, where it is deinterlaced, converted to analog, sent to the display, and reconverted back to digital.

I thought it was common knowledge that LD was natively composite, which explains why better image quality can usually be had using a composite connection rather than the S-Video one of a late player, because the comb filter in the TV or video processor is usually better than that of the player.

Processing a composite laserdisc signal via a better comb filter improves the image by interpreting the source signal more accurately, while an upconverting DVD player involves adding interpolated information. Not the same thing.

Using a state-of-the-art comb filter will generate a more accurate image from laserdisc signals; how does that not lead to improved detail?

Both composite and component require conversion to work with digital TVs, and component often requires scaling, too (here's an old write-up of mine on how tough full aspect ratio control was on early analog HD-ready sets).

Does a composite signal require more digitization than a component one? I think not.

I haven't too many laserdisc transfers that approach their DVD counterparts, but in fairness, nearly all the former date back to the early '90s or beyond, and video transfer technology has increased tremendously since then (and many of said titles have been restored for their DVD versions).

Since I'm such a fucking idiot, I'll just crawl back into my hole. I mean, it's probably better this way... otherwise I'd say something stupid like pointing out that component is miles ahead of composite because it's well, duh... individual COMPONENTS of the video signal. I'd go on to say that with composite, the entire picture is contained in one signal, whereas with S-Video the luma and chroma components are separate so there's less crosstalk, and a sharper, more accurate image results. I'd also spout some nonsense that component, while not actually RGB as one might be led to believe by the colors of the input jacks, keeps THREE components separate until the final display is created, thus preserving as much detail as possible. That's just the kind of stupid shit I say in this forum.

God knows we'd all be better off if I'd just shut the fuck up and admit that LASERDISC RULZ instead of delving further into the technical aspects of composite vs. component. After all, they're both analog and use the same kind of RCA jack, so aren't they exactly the same??? Well of course they are Timmy, just run along now and play in the street, won't you?

Nobody have said the composite is as good as component. You should read more carefully what we say.

This arguement is tiresome. One can't admit he's even partially wrong and the other can't resist gloating about it. Everything bad about internet forums in one little thread.

He doesn't care what we're actually saying. We could say "the sun rises in the east" and he'd just twist our words into a ridiculous diatribe about how he's the world's foremost expert on astronomy. To prove this, he'll deliver a lengthy rant about planetary orbits in which he'll get even the most basic of facts wrong, such as stating the Earth is the 5th planet from the sun. If anyone dares to correct him, he'll whine that he's being persecuted for his superior intellect.

This is a fruitless conversation. Best to just ignore him and move on.

Luckily it's in a laserdisc thread, so 99.9% of the forum members here haven't even read it.

haha, funny

Pretty much sums it up. What a bunch of hot air about nothing.

i reckon about 95% of uk dvd owners do not know what a laserdisc was.

I keep my laserdisc player for Quo Vadis, The Fall of the Roman Empire (despite annoying aliasing problems), El Cid and, of course, the colourized King Kong.

Yeah, there are a lot of esoteric titles on laserdisc that I can't believe were released for such a niche format.

Actually, I've admitted over and over again that I've been partially wrong more than once. The problem arises when I'm dismissed as a complete idiot because I haven't been 100% correct, and of course there's also the flak for going against long-held beliefs that are just plain wrong, but too comfortable to let go of. You're right though, it's the internet at it's worst.

Oh, and Josh, I could say "the sun rises in the east", and you'd just fire back that since the sun actually rises about 10 degrees north of due east, I don't even know what color the sun is, which is of course ridiculous, but indicative of the double-standard that is your m.o. more often than not. nin74 would then chime in and ask me what kind of sunglasses I owned, and if they weren't $80 Oakleys, he'd claim to have much "bigger" knowledge of the sun, as if it were a different one than the one I see every day. He'd probably continue by saying that he heard the sun was carried across the sky in a chariot by Apollo, and you'd say nothing.

Can a mod just close this fucking thread already???????