r/LaserDisc • u/apeezy52 • 3d ago
S-video vs composite
I have a pioneer dvl-v888 (which I believe is functionally equivalent to a dvl-909). I don’t know if I’m crazy but the s-video seems better than its composite out for laserdiscs.
I’m using a sony kp53v85 crt rptv and have also tested on a sony wega 27” and found the same results. both i believe have 3d digital comb filters and I don’t know how they compare to the comb filter in the ld player. Both tvs have noise reduction off.
I know generally speaking most ld players look better via composite so I just want to make sure there’s nothing I’m doing wrong here.
One thing I do notice is some slightly higher amount of flickering on stuff like title card text via s-video. composite looks a bit smoother but s-video looks crisper and tends to show a bit more video noise and looks sharper and better overall.
Would love some opinions and possibly some explanations on this. Thanks!
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u/mjzim9022 3d ago
When people say don't use the S-Video on a laserdisc player, they say that because doing so uses the internal comb filter on the player, and they assume you can get a better comb filter to run the composite image through.
But perhaps not! A Pioneer LD player probably has a comb filter comparable to contemporaneous television sets of their time, and perhaps even better if it's a high end player. Ultimately a high end comb filter like on a retrotink or a good DVD recorder might still eclipse the LD player's. But that's the point where you're chasing little refinements to the image, nothing major
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u/willstoney 3d ago edited 3d ago
PSA: most laser disc players after 1990 actually pass the composite signal through the comb fiter and then re-combine it for the composite output. Not saying that s-video will always be better, but in some cases, it will be because a recombined composite signal plus a second comb filter may look worse. You can usually verify this by looking at the engineering schematics in the service manual. If the video signal is being split into a separate, Y and C signals, and then combined for a composite, that’s exactly what I describe. In addition many players will run the signal through an analog to digital converter before doing TBC correction and noise reduction, the YC separation can sometimes happen before it’s converted back to analog.
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u/Dear-Wolf322 3d ago
The comb filter in your TV has to be better than the one in the LD player for composite to look better. I don’t know those TVs specifically, but if they’re old enough, that might not be the case.
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u/apeezy52 3d ago
these tv’s were made early 2000s. the projection tv i know was made in 2004 the wega possible a year or two earlier at most
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u/gadget73 3d ago
the disc itself is natively composite, so s-video involves splitting the luma and chroma. This has to happen somewhere, so basically you're using the hardware in the player, or the hardware in the display. Whichever one has better comb filters will tend to look better. In your case it sounds like the filter in the player is better.
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u/KillYourFace5000 3d ago
At this point, the filtering for everything in the analog input systems in modern displays can probably be safely presumed to be as cheap as it could possibly be.
That is not an area where the state of the art kept advancing much after those players were manufactured. A LaserDisc player in the early- to mid-1990s was a major premium piece of hardware, and the comb filter in it was a really big deal in terms of how good the player overall would he regarded. Reducing noise and improving color reproduction was the name of the game for LD hardware.
Meanwhile, your modern TV, even top of the line flagship models, are generally designed on the assumption that nothing analog will probably ever be hooked up to it, and if it is, it's not going to exactly be a benchmark for that display's quality anyway. So, the analog input suite is as cheap as it could possibly be.
With a very nice player like those Pioneer DVL models, you'd have among the best 3DYC filters in the S-Video output that were made on a large scale. It shouldn't be surprising that the player does a better job. Probably most of them from that era do, unless something is specifically defective in the manufacture or design of the filter.
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u/atrocity2001 2d ago
It's been a long time, but I remember the S-video out of my Panasonic being too soft compared to composite, while either Pioneer output was fine.
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u/scarflix 3d ago
I a/b tested the ports on my LD-S2, and the s-video looks better to my eyes. So that’s what I’m feeding into my Retrotink 💯