Hi,

call me stupid but I never could get my LD player to properly work with the outbord PAL+ decoder. (There is only one, that thing by Nokia/Philips/Grundig). I would get an image, but it was horribly distorted with artifacts. So I scrapped the decoder.

I recall that the Sony Pal+ LD worked quite well in a shop were I saw it connected to a full spec CRT from Sony.

Does anyone have a properly working setup with that decoder?

Cheers,

You name 3 brands in one word, which decoder you've actually got, or could it be a faulty one?

I've got a Pal+ decoder from Sony, TVD 200.
I've got an Pal+ LD of Das Volk der Gräser ((Stinging) Arthropod Folks living in the Fields).

What i noticed is that when i used the setup ld player + decoder + tv
vs
ld player + tv
there was not so much of a difference.

My setup is Pioneer CLD D925, Sony TVD 200 and a Philips PW 28 9551 "HD Ready" CRT via composite or s-video.

With the decoder it even looked a bit blurrier the image, while you would expect it to be the opposite.
I guess my tv has a nicer 16:9 zoom, than the decoder would have to extract the 'invisible' lines, rebuild to an anamorph picture, which will then get stretched again to become 16:9.
For a while in the late 90's there were a few broadcasts in pal plus+ and i heard from people that those looked very nice compared to letterboxed widescreen broadcasts.



In the end, i think it isn't worth the hassle and zoom 16:9 would be fair enough,
unless there would be a high end Pal+ decoder attached to a high end external video processor to deliver component video to your tv.
But then again, what difference in quality would it be when the high end processor would have a good zoom 16:9 scaler for letterboxed video?

(Of course full 4:3 picture squeeze ld's are awesome, because they only have to stretched to 16:9 by your tv or processor).

Found nice pics on eBay => Sony TVD-200



Julien