Screenshot from DS9 - 111 - The Nagus (Laserdisc)
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That is suprisingly good quality. I have never really seen a still shot from laserdisc before, can see why it had a following back in the day.
I should note that this image is not really representative of LD technology in it's natural state. I am using a special device (Domesday Duplicator) that captures the raw signal from the laser sensor and dumps it to a disk for software decoding, thereby bypassing all the video circuitry. I also used Gigapixel AI to upscale the image to 4K, which works great, but you could get good results from regular scaling too.
This is the raw output from the decoder:
Well that's cool.
It almost looks like an upscale using the laserdiscs instead of the DVDs might yield a nicer image.
This is being researched and experimented with at this very moment. A couple episodes are currently in the testing phase.
Normally a DVD would win a matchup for PQ, except in rare instances, but there are a lot of problems with the ST DVD releases which evens the playing field.
Paramount jamming 4x45 minute episodes plus extras onto a single layer 4.7gb disc is a major one. This adds in a ton of lossy compression artifacts and degrades the image substantially. By comparison, the LD has 1 episode per disc and there is no compression because its analog (Not without its own downsides though).
Here's a preview of a test render:
My dad was an adopter of LD and we had like the only widescreen on the block so my parents would host movie nights for the neighbors haha. He also was obsessed with ripping rentals of them to his Hi-8 tapes haha. We probably have like every movie in the 90s on LaserDisc or Hi-8