I think I'd take the 5 percent cut off on the right side of screen on the LX-900 over the hideous CLV smearing the CLD-99 does. I have a bunch of horror movies I've been capturing lately and the CLV smear is really apparent on the CLD-99. I will take screen shots of it to show you what I mean. Even when I turn the brightness down to make the blacks stand out a little better there's still CLV smear noticeable on the Moon in Silver Bullet and other horror movies that show space off. Now I haven't tested the CLD-99 on a crt tv so I don't know if the smear is less noticeable on that but on a 4k 32 inch monitor it's really noticeable and on my 43 inch sharp tv I was noticing the smear even on white backgrounds when I was watching Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. This player was one of Pioneer's most expensive players released in the US market with a retail price of $2,500 and it has some of the worst CLV smear. I think the CLV smear is even less on my CLD-3080 and I forget what the CLV-smear looks like on the CLD-53 if there is any. Now I don't know if the smear is more noticeable on the CLD-99 because it might be producing slightly better definition to show off details but I do know it's giving my brain a headache seeing it. Now I don't know if when I stream movies to people if it makes more sense to use my LX-900 captures or my CLD-99. I'm almost thinking it makes more sense to use the LX-900 captures.

https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/the-dreaded-clv-laserdisc-smear.228817/

If the CLD-99 is such a disappointment to you I'll gladly take it off your hands

I'm recapturing Silver Bullet with my lx-900 because for some reason I lost the copy of the movie where I had the black brightness set to darker because apparently the one copy of it I have on my external hard-drive the brightness is so high that all the blacks look gray. I can tell right away that not only is there virtually no smearing on the lx-900 but the colors on the lx-900 appear to be better overall. The reds look red and the skin tones look better. People with tan look tan on the lx-900 while on my cld-99 for some reason they look a bit yellowish for some reason. It's really a shame Panasonic screwed this player up by cutting 5 percent of the right side of the screen up because other than that they made a beautiful player. Now if someone is watching laserdiscs on a crt tv or a tv that is built for 4:3 aspect ratio the LX-900 probably would be 0 issues because you're not even going to see side-bars like we do on lcd, led, and oled tvs. However on a big screen tv which the Panasonic still looks gorgeous you'll notice that the black bar on the right side of screen is a little larger than the one on the left side of the screen. The clv smearing and colors looking inaccurate on the CLD-99 makes me want to list my LX-900 before it in my signature. I will because I was led to believe that Pioneer > Panasonic but I definitely prefer the colors on the Panasonic. The reds look red on the USA flag and on the CLD-99 it looks a bit orange on the flag or not as vibrant.

Who ever on here owns the clones of LX-900 that fixed the cut off issues in the LX-900 has what I consider probably one of the best if not the number 1 laserdisc player there is. The only thing that probably competes against the clones that fixed the issues with the LX-900 is probably HLD-x9 but I would love to see screencaptures of the HLD-x9 because I have feeling Pioneer is going to lose in the color accuracy department. Isn't the HLD-x9 just a smear free version of my cld-99 and probably produces similar colors or did Pioneer increase color accuracy with the HLD-x9? Okay give me some time I have to wait for this capture to finish which is in about an hour and five minutes. I will show off the color differences between the two players and you guys and gals can decide which colors you prefer.

I feel like you won't be able to notice the smearing much on still images but in motion it's really noticeable on the cld-99. I also might have the brightness set to pretty dark which might be hiding it a bit. Which colors do you prefer? I think the LX-900 is producing better colors overall but I'm sure everyone's eyes see different colors. Maybe some people prefer the colors on the CLD-99 but I feel like people are looking a bit more yellow on the cld-99 from what my eyes are showing me. I do wear glasses and I don't have perfect vision. LX-900 is on top obviously since it has part of the right side of the screen cut off. Neither player is perfect obviously but I believe the LX-900 is producing a little bit better maybe more accurate colors or nicer on the eyes while the CLD-99 suffers from noticeable CLV smearing which is more noticeable in person and hard to tell from screen captures. And the LX-900 has that defect cutting off a percentage of the right side of the screen.

LX-900 composite vs CLD-99 s-video

On reddit people claim the reason that the clv smear shows up is because this player is showing flaws in the CLV format because of it being slightly higher definition or the best of the best. I don't know if that's true but I guess I'll put my cld-99 in front of the lx-900. I am still annoyed the lx-900 cuts off a percentage of the screen but at same time clv smear is pretty nasty looking as well. The perfect players all cost way over a grand. I don't know about you but I would never shell out that type of $$$.

Maybe its me or they way the images are presented but on the one with the blonde girl that you ask about skin tone, the 900 with the extra black on the right looks slightly compressed/squeezed horizontally and thus the AR looks a little off compared to the 99. Other images are less telling but it looks to be consistent.

Can you put up a test image with a circle in it as a comparison? Or could you overlay two images in photoshop to confirm the image is cut off and not squished?

I haven't been paying too much attention to your 900 saga so maybe I missed that bit. I'm sure its been investigated I just don't care enough to look it up right now.

My 900 is from April 1995 and seems to be not affected by the APL issue or the cut off issue...I like this player a lot except that it pauses a still frame on the side flip

I am pretty sure that it has been confirmed by multiple experts on lddb forum that the image is indeed cut off. I don't believe it's squished but let's see if someone else responds. I think it looks like it's cutting off a bit of the right side of the screen and could have sworn I read on this forum that it is a normal issue with this player. That's kind of weird yours doesn't suffer from that issue. My player is from October 1995 and when I play it on our 65 inch tcl 4k tv it shows the right black bar being a bit bigger than the left side.

Copy that, don't want to go against the grain of those experts

Some of the experts who've suggested certain high end units have missed the fact that the image is cut off on the top of the fame until YEARS later (Lumagen/Kramer). So much in-depth testing and they missed that its cutting off the frame...

Remember; this is Laserdisc there is no "perfect". No perfect software, player, processor or display.

I tried to line up your images but realized you hadn't used the exact same frame so I assumed whatever differences I saw were just a slight difference in the angle of the frame. For comparisons it may be useful to tun on the display so you can show the frame/time so you can make fair evaluations of different set ups with the same disc and frame.

My 900 lives in a spare room and is connected to my CRT so I guess I haven't really checked it against anything else. Again, the fact that it shows a random still on side flips makes it a no go for me in the main room. The 600 looks almost as good and goes to black on side flips, which I prefer.

Maybe I'll do a quick test this week. The 900 is connected to my DVD recorder so its easy to make a recording.

That might be the reason you haven't noticed a cut off on the right side. CRT's will usually overscan so the cut off is hidden. I believe the advent of fixed pixel displays is what made it more obvious to owners of the LX-900 that there was a picture cut off issue.