Video Asylum

Posted by Lasermeister (A) on November 20, 2001 at 15:33:33

In Reply to: Which ultimately is the better quality format, laserdisc or DVD? posted by John C. - Aussie on November 19, 2001 at 20:23:29:

Both formats have their problems, LD with chroma noise, and DVD with digital artifacts. Almost no one has seen the picture quality capable with the HLD-X9, a Japanese import player with performance noticeably better than anything that Pioneer released in the US. I plan on getting one myself hopefully in the near future, as they will not be available forever.

The post listing the superiority of DVD's specs is not particularly persuasive to this individual. Vinyl has poor specifications compared to CD, but many audiophiles prefer listening to their LPs. In reality, CD measures well but has some annoying sonic attributes that many audiophiles pick up on.

I think it's at least a vaguely similar story with LD vs DVD. I have four of the best of the US released Pioneer LD players (CLD-95, CLD-97, LD-S2, and CLD-79) versus a little Pioneer DV-414 player I got at Best Buy a couple years ago for $275 (This player does have the same chassis as the highly regarded DV-05 Elite machine from the same time period). Honestly, I see picture details with the DVD player that I don't believe any of the LD players are capable of revealing.

OTOH, the digital artifacts the DVD player produces are fairly annoying (It's not just my machine; I've seen them with every DVD player I've ever seen a movie on). These are not the result of a poorly adjusted picture; it's a result of the problems the MPEG-2 encoding has with such things as surfaces that are not uniformly lit, producing a contouring effect (mentioned in the last issue of The Perfect Vision). I see this very, very often on background surfaces and personally find it more annoying than LD chroma noise. I believe I'm in a distinct minority on that point, however.

As far as audio quality, it's really unfortunate that DVD was stuck with the lossy Dolby Digital system as its standard audio format. While this may be fine for whiz bang surround effects, it's not as good as the old LD standard of 16 bit PCM, or probably even as good as a good LD analog soundtrack. I know that PCM can be used on DVDs, but it seems like they don't do it very often.

In short, both are imperfect consumer formats. DVD is far more consumer friendly than LD ever was, while having at least very good performance. Ultimately, which one is higher quality comes down to the eyes and ears of the beholder and the particular equipment they have, especially with LD.

Todd