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

All the decoders are the same, just with different logos. AFAIR only one type was ever produced (besides the integrated one in expensive TVs) and everyone just put it in a different casing.