Hi!

Got a question here that I'm not quite sure the answer to. Played Urusei Yatsura: Movie #3 Remember My Love (1985) [AD093-006] tonight, and noticed a lot of short horizontal lines that were flickering around the image. Noticed it best in the subtitles, but would flicker around the image in general. What type of defect are these? The disc it self is clean. Spotted a small hairline scratch that I needed a very special angle to be able to see. I've seen this same phenomenon happen on other discs too, one of them being Indiana Jones Trilogy [PILF-1560].

Can't quite make up my mind what this is. Doesn't quite look like dropouts either. Included some pictures (CLV still frames) showing the small lines:

This can happen if you turn the sharpness all the way up, if that is not the case you need to get the player serviced.

The sharpness is turned off. Can probably count on one hand how many discs that does this in my collection. I've played dozens of other discs without getting this phenomenon. Thought this was some sort of mastering error.

I've seen dropouts sort of like that, but the dropout detection in the player should be catching them.

Did some more testing. Tried it out on my CLD-2950 (connected to a CRT) and didn't see any of those odd lines. Might've been something odd going on with the deinterlacing, so I pulled out one of my portable PVM CRTs that I hooked up to my X9. Right away I still spotted those lines.

So this means my X9 does in fact need a service? What type of service, or what needs to be serviced exactly?

A bit odd this only occur on a very few selection of laserdiscs. As I said, out of the 400 or so discs I have, I can count on one hand how many that show those lines.

Might be a wild guess, but...

Maybe the disc has some kind of defect that your X9 shows, while the 2950 ignores it.
The 3M pressings of those Urusei Yatsura movies were not that good looking on my X9 either.
I had an LD once, Manhunter (1986) (Uncut) [411], which looked like worst case of laser rot on my X9. All three sides of it.
It did play perfectly normal on my 2850 however.

Yes, I guess it is a pressing defect that the X9 picks up. I've been told by another X9 owner that the player picks up rot easier. Then a poorly pressed disc with dropouts would show defects in the picture too. Since only a very few selection of discs does show this phenomenon, it can't really be the player that needs service. If that was the case, I would expect every disc to be like this.

I'd say if you are concerned you need to get all the electrical adjustments verified (servo's and max settings). You have two different items to deal with, the red laser and a sharper image from the X9.

Don't really feel concerned. I've experienced some differences personally, and other X9 users seem to verify it.

I guess these lines are just regular dropouts? At least the closest thing I can come up with.

Yeah - the red laser is probably 'seeing' the dropouts differently and I guess the dropout compensator doesn't have compensation for it.

Also note by the time the X9 came out the Japanese plants were pretty much all making rot-free disks.

Aren't these precisely the effect of dropout compensation? At least that's what primitive VHS dropout compensation looks like.

The "artifacts" are a portion of the line that is copied 1:1 from two lines above, i.e. it's a repeat of the information from the prevous line of the same field. I think the defect would be less obvious if it was a truly interlaced image instead of telecined.

At least with my decoder, lot of dropout patterns cause either a brief spike and/or a dark bit about that length. On LD a dropout compensator detects it and uses the previous line in the field's data to make it less noticable than this. It looks like the X9's doesn't always work correctly.

Hi all,

I have this similar problem with these with stripes/artifacts on the Pioneer DVL-909. The funny thing is that when a disc is playing, it only happens at the beginning of a disc (side). So the same happens when the players auto switches to side B. Then for some minutes the artifacts show up and disappear after some minutes.

When I play the exact same disc on a CLD-D925 the picture is just fine without any artifacts.

I've attached a picture of it.

Do you know if this is fixable?


Thanks,
Jeroen

These are common defects pressed into the disc. I have a few that do this. The US pressing of Far and Away, one of the volumes of Ariel and something else...it's SD Gundam I think. I think my first pressing of Unico and the Island of Magic does it too.

And yeah, they usually show themselves at the begining of a side, which probably has something to do with variable speed versus how the the defect pattern is spread across the disc. Some players make a bigger deal out of them and I don't think the perceived quality of the player has anything to do with it.

This is commonly described as "rot" by people who don't know any better.

Btw, I think this is a CLV-only phenomenon but I would be interested in hearing differently.

Thanks for the reply!

Interesting point regarding the cav discs. I will try that soon and let you know if it also happens with these.
I will also try some other discs to see if not all discs have this problem with this specific player.

I think i agree, i don't remember seeing these drop outs on CAV but only CLV, i know there is one on my Diehard and i remember seeing
them sometimes in the past.

Not a big issue and not rot, i don't even think it has to do with red laser picking them up over standard laser.

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I did some testing with a CAV disc (Jurassic Park) and the horizontal stripes are still present. It appears to be less present though, but still there.
I also used some IPA to clean the lens, but that did not help either.

Funny thing is that when I press pause and see the with stripe in the picture and used step forward and step back, the strip disappears in the first pause frame. It most certainly has to do something with the player, but I have no idea if and how I can fix this. Pioneer the Netherlands said there are no service points anymore to get LD players fixed

Not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but when I start Turbulence for example the horizontal white stripe is at a fixed position in the picture, after a few minutes the stripe scrolls from top to bottom. Then after some more minutes I have the feeling it scrolls too fast to see it actually scrolls from top to bottom...
After 30 minutes of playing it is almost gone, but never completely.

Any thoughts anyone?

Btw, I also noticed the player suffers from crosstalk.

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This page was pretty helpful telling me all kinds of possible problems with laserdiscs: http://www.blam1.com/LaserDisc/FAQ/FAQ_Hardware.htm
Although it does not provides solutions (perhaps too difficult for a non-laserdisc technician, like me).

There is nothing wrong with your player or your TV. The defect is in the disc and no amount of messing with things or writing checks to people will fix it. The reason your player produces this defect is because it works. The thing is on the disc. It's the players job to show you what's on the disc. Everything is working properly. You can't fix this.

A properly aligned tilt sensor and tracking can help with crosstalk in non-pathological cases - you'ld need the service manual and a pioneer reference disk (ggv1069), maybe even a scope, but if the disk is really bad it ain't going away.