The issue with this kind of thinking is that upscaling cannot be done without deinterlacing. In other words, the 15KHz signal will be digitized to a 480i/59.94Hz signal and then deinterlaced (or even line-doubled in some cases) to 480p/59.94Hz. The result may then be upscaled to any desired resolution. Interlacing the signal once more isn't optimal unless the desired monitor may only display an interlaced signal at best. This goes for early HD CRTs (limited to 31/33KHz) which can provide very interesting and often good results but are ultimately not suited very well for Laserdiscs by any means.

@nissling: When I wrote "digitally enhanced" I did not mean "digitized video". To get the best out of Laserdisc you should neither deinterlace nor upscale the video signal because this means first of all downgrading the picture quality by digitizing. I meant that the universal super player should use digital processors to fine-tune and to control the process of the analog reproduction of the analog video content, and for HD discs, such as the MUSE Hi-Vision LDs and Sony's (non-MUSE) HDVS Videodiscs the natural output would be an interleaved component signal "analog 1080i" (actually with analog HD discs it is not maximally 1080, but only 1035 scan lines within the 1125 scan lines of a HD frame). In case of NTSC Laserdiscs I would like to see accordingly an interleaved analog component signal with "analog 480i" (actually 482 scan lines), in case of PAL Laserdiscs "analog 576i" (actually 575 scan lines). The optimal display for these signals would be a High-Definition CRT being able to display natively (!) all these interleaved video formats, as opposed to a display that digitizes the signal to deinterlace it before displaying it - as all current LCD screens do. However an optimal HD CRT suited for the universal Laserdisc super player should meet higher resolution standards than those HD CRTs from 2004 when many of them were sold in Japan.

Many people think that a digital HDMI output would always be superior to analog output, but this is not correct. In one horizontal scan line of the digital 1920x1080p format a colour change can start at any one of 1920 different positions, if it is a "4K" format it is even one of 3840 different positions. However in case of an NTSC or PAL Laserdisc (or a Sony HDVS Videodisc) a colour change can start at any of millions of different positions within one scan line - this is why the signal is called "analog". The number of colour changes per line may be restricted by a given frequency band, i.e. more restricted than it is with digital signals, but the horizontal positions of the changes have more freedom than in digital formats. Therefore it is not easy to compare the horizontal resolution of analog and digital media ...

With MUSE Hi-Vision LDs however a direct resolution comparison is possible, because of the "half-digital" nature of the MUSE compression scheme: the picture resolution of Hi-Vision LDs equals maximally to 1060 x 1035 pixels - Bluray offers maximally 1920 x 1080 pixels, PAL DVDs maximally 720 x 576 pixels, and NTSC DVDs maximally 720 x 480 pixels.

In your first post, you didn't state that a future player would use any analog outputs whatsoever and that the signal would be 1080i because Laserdiscs are interlaced. In other words, what you just wrote doesn't go very well in hand with what you originally said.

While analog formats don't have any discrete pixels like a digital signal, the limits are still rather simple to measure with test patterns. The results may be shown in the amount of TVLs (which on Laserdisc is 425 for luminance and 120 for chroma at best) or bandwidth (which in this case is 4.43MHz). This is all theoretical, but translated to a digital resolution, Laserdisc would at the very best be around 565*480 in 4:1:1 and a pixel ratio of 1,13. Due to its high noise floor however, the results are still a good step below an uncompressed digital video file in YUV at the very same resolution and this is all very evident in its color reproduction.

In the end, no. You don't have "more freedom" with an analog format than a digital when it comes to the "horizontal positions". Just because the signal itself is analog doesn't mean that you can place the information wherever you'd like. In fact, you'd be surprised to see just how much more limited you get. You should have a look at this article that explains very clearly just how little impact the resolution has to the final results.
http://vashivisuals.com/empirical-truth ... s-digital/

DVD has 704 active horizontal pixels by the way. Many DVD players however incorrectly samples the signal from 720 horizontal pixels and this causes some nasty artifacts.

You can't win a battle against analog shamanism with facts. Hasn't Forper taught you that yet?