Laserdisc player advice (1 Viewer)

[Aaron Reynolds]

Wow, you must have had really bad luck buying a TV with a horrible comb filter!

 

[Philip Hamm]

Try comparing the comb filters using the Snell & Wilcox test pattern on side 2 of Video Essentials. It's a torture test for comb filters.

 

[Chris*Liberti]

You just missed out on a good player on eBay for a good price. Someone got a Pioneer CLD-R7G on there less than a week ago for $500. I missed out on it by a few hours, forgot it was ending, and I am kicking myself right now.

 

[alan halvorson]

Can anyone tell me about the Kenwood LVD-Z1? It seems to be a statement LD player by Kenwood but I've never heard of it. I don't believe it was ever exported to the USA.

 

[BroomoLDmadness]

Hello Chris*

Never mind friend! this also happened to me in January with a CLD-99 but fortunately i purchased a better one that had hardly been used.

I have found that with Laserdisc players and enthusiast's, that a lot of people had back up players that they never used and when DVD came along they gradually lost interest and purchased DVD's instead or replaced.

For instance! i have a seller in the US that has a brand new ELITE CLD 97, box has never been opened and the only time that this will is when they have sorted out the shipping cost and courier service to take the weight.

I have wanted one of these babies for about eight years now, so keep looking and i am sure that you will find what you are looking for friend.

Kindest regards

 

[Allan Jayne]

A small number of LD players, all high end models, do not deliver native composite output but rather re-composite their comb filtered S-video signal for the composite ouput. Supposedly this processing includes additional noise reduction and color error correction (time base correction).

In almost all of these cases, the usual rule of "which looks better -- composite or S-video" will find the S-video output giving a better picture.

The Snell & Wilcox test pattern on LD Video Essentials also points out chrominance horizontal resolution. This is analogous to lines of resolution and represents the number of color changes that can occur across a given distance. All VCR's can only do at most 40 color changes all the way across the screen, and only the coarser test pattern with yellow and blue spots will reproduce. The finer pattern with red and blue spots represents up to 160 color changes across the screen. For LD, the comb filter if any in the player, the comb filter in the TV, and also the color decoder in the TVeach either has this much chrominance resolution or it does not. DVD itself allows 360 color changes across the screen but if you use the S-video connection you are relying on the TV color decoder which at best does 160 color changes across.

 

[0x15e]

What you say about recompositing the video makes sense. Since the player allows setting the noise reduction on the Y and C signals separately, it must have to split it internally at some point. It would seem that recombining those, only to have the TV split them again, just adds unnecessary processing to the signal and increases the potential for noise. Do I understand that right?

Thanks for those details. I tested mine with that pattern but wasn't really sure what I was looking for. What I saw was that that the alternating black / white striped areas at the top had a sort of rainbow look, and the rainbow was rolling through the block. Using the player's filter, it was rolling a little slower, but I couldn't see much of a difference otherwise. I'm going to have to give it another look one of these days.

 

[Philip Hamm]

Correct!! Any "Noise Reduction" functions on the LaserDisc player should be turned off on any LaserDisc player used on a modern TV with a competent 3D comb filter. And, again, the Snell & Wilcox pattern on the Video Essentials LaserDisc is a great way to get an idea where the best comb filter is (and a good indicater of overall analog composite performance of any display). Allan tries to explain it, but it's a lot more dramatic to see in action the rainbowing as the target circle travels around the screen and the many differernt patterns on the display.

It's possible (probable actually) that the best picture you can get is from the LD player with noise reduction disabled. The NR was great with old NTSC sets (it did wonders with my old Mitsubishi 50" 3-gun CRT model), but is outdated and poor compared to even the most basic video processing in modern TV sets. - Again YMMV, as others have suggested, some modern TVs have cursory or poor analog video processing. This is believable since analog video is becoming such an anachronism.

The Faroudja processing in my Infocus X1 does an almost miraculous job with LaserDisc. At least compared to the S-Video output on my old CLD-99. When I got the X1 I sold the CLD-99 because there was no difference in picture quality between that and my CLD-D704.