I have noticed S-Video lasted through the end of the LD lifecycle, but many of these players featured Component out for DVD playback. Why not for LD?

Is there some technical reason that the composite signal coming off the LD would be challenging to convert to the compressed RGB format?

I think S-Video looks great; but Component is certainly a smidge better and you can get 480p pro-scan as well which is even sharper still.

Someone help me figure this out because i always have wondered....

There are many posts over the years I've seen explaining the difference, I feel depending on your set one is better than the other due to or lack of.
Give it a search and you will find it.

The players that also played DVDs were really DVD players that were also backwards compatible. Aside from the component out, they could have put a much nicer LD unit inside or used the red DVD laser to read LDs. I think they saw the writing on the wall and went cheap as the market would allow.

In 2020 though it really doesn't matter if you are using a modern display. You want to get the least processed composite signal out of the player and pipe it through modern circuitry.

LD has composite video right there on the disc. The TVs already handle it. There is zero point in building an expensive converter in every player. You cannot make a picture better by converting it to a better format because you still have all the flaws of the original in place as well as all the flaws from the conversion. With 90s tech it wouldn’t have looked very good anyway.

Probably because it would just cost too much and would need another circuit board or two in the LD player.

IE: more trouble/cost than it's worth.

I mean, if they weren't going include an RF demodulator in LD players when they implemented AC-3, I can't see them adding anything to convert composite to component inside a player either. And look at higher end comb filters. How many LD players have 3D comb filters? Only a handful. Only another handful have not-bottom-of-the-barrel 2D comb filters.

Hell, even DVD/VHS players (not recorders, players) don't convert the color-under signal from VHS to the component outs on those machines.

By the time these "luxuries" became more affordable to be put in players, LD was already on its way out. There was no point in trying to make a better player for a format that was quickly being replaced by DVD.

Wait so are you saying composite converted to HDMI will look better than an S-Video signal converted to HDMI, because there is one less signal processor?

Right now i have S-Video upscaled to 1080p through an HDMI converter box and it looks pretty good, but can lag/jitter occasionally which i only seem to notice during the credits.

No, if I'm not mistaken I think cplusplus is meaning send the signal straight from the LD player using its composite out to your modern (say OLED)TVs composite input then let its far superior in most cases comb filter do the processing.

Yep.

What about 2008-2016 era LCD 1080p TV's?

I tend NOT to buy TV's very often (unless they break and are unrepairable)

It's just so hard for me to fathom composite looking better than S-Video because i'm so used to the opposite being true.... S-Video (for videogame systems, etc) typically looks much sharper.

But i get there is a point of diminishing returns when you are sending the signal through 4+ filers (LD Internal filter, up-scaler, receiver, tv) My composite would still be going into my Sony STR-DN1080 before going to my TV regardless as does the upscaled S-Video. Can't imagine a situation where i'd be able to plug an LD player directly into a TV. I have way too much stuff hooked up to use one input for one box.

Essentially, composite video is permanently encoded on the laserdisc. Composite video is a single channel. S-Video, in contrast, is two channels. You can't take two from one without splitting at some point. The question is: do the electronics in the player do a better job than the electronics in the TV? Either way, try both with Video Essentials (1996) [ID3487ISF], and just use whatever looks best to your eye.

With video games, the games contain code instead of video that is executed by the console.

Edit: fixed link.

DVDs are encoded in component. Therefore, component cables or component over HDMI is the "purest" signal from a dvd, and is why combo players had it.

Video game systems are inherently RGB (excluding dragon's lair and 3d0 fmv titles). Using S-video out of a video game console is better than composite because the color and luminance are never combined (and therefore not needing to be separated).

Laserdisc IS composite, so composite out is the "purest" signal from the LD player.

You can't compare video game systems to LD.

My ~2008ish plasma TV did a better job with LD than anything i have tried "in between" (for capturing). However you should just test. For me, even back in 1993, my Panasonic SuperFLAT 27" CRT did better decoding composite than my Pioneer CLD-D504. So i used composite from LD to TV, even though they both had S-Video.

Crazy...so i am literally making the picture worse by upscaling s-video to HDMI?

Will try Composite directly and see how it compares.

Probably. I run composite directly into my TV.

Maybe, probably, but what I don’t get is what you didn’t even try it. Somewhere on the internet people are being indoctrinated into believing that you literally always need some doodad in between the player and the source. That’s a mentally that it seems like all new users have totally bought into. I wonder where they learn it...

To clarify, the s-video coming from many players is better than the composite when using period displays. The R7G and 99 are in this category. Most of the time these days though you don’t have a TV with an s-video input anyway so it’s useless. If it’s a decent TV, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, you’ll likely get the best picture from straight composite. If you have a Walmart TV or a monitor with no signal processing then you will benefit from a box of some kind, they cost more than a decent TV so I never use them.

Probably Facebook.

I think it might also be the way AV Receiver manufacturers tout the ability of their high end units that can up-convert everything to HDMI. My Denon does that and it looks terrible so I literally run three sets of AV connections from it to my TV (composite, component and HDMI). The great thing about doing this is that I can optimize the video settings of each input on the TV to get the best contrast and brightness for the different formats I playback.

S-Video was a solution for a broken system the US established. My honest belief is that as Japan was trying to phase out NTSC and move to MUSE HD broadcasting, they were pushing hard for the eventual obsolescence of composite video connections (which had only moderate acceptance by the time MUSE broadcasts started in 1989) due to the inherent phase issues from the color subcarrier.

S-Video connections transmit luma (brightness/B&W) & chroma (color) separately to the destination, and would allow easy transmission of "old" 59.94Hz NTSC and 60Hz MUSE->NTSC reducing complexity of MUSE->NTSC downconverters and TVs. Composite, on the other hand, will artifact with 60Hz signals (besides the visual issues which are inherent to composite NTSC video itself).

LD is established to be a composite format but in an alternate dimension where analog MUSE became an accepted HD standard, there may have been small/standard definition TVs with no composite video inputs. To install an S-Video output in an LD player would have nicely "future-proofed" it and encouraged S-Video adoption.

To break a composite video signal out into the RGB components requires many precise filters and, if not calibrated correctly, will give you varying colors between each of your sources. It's much smarter to do it at the destination (i.e. TV) for consistency. In the analog domain, this also meant a lot of components. If you find old broadcast-grade composite to RGB/component transcoders, they're whole 1U rack-sized units with required calibration for each color channel! Not something you want to put into a tiny, affordably-priced LaserDisc player. Separating the NTSC luma from the chroma is much easier & cheaper since the colors should be guaranteed to remain at their relative voltages and have correct timing via one simple cable. You can see in the service manuals for LD players with S-Video that the signal paths break the video into luma & chroma with no RGB separation. OSDs were easy to implement too just by modifying the luma channel and passing through chroma unmodified. S-Video was the easiest and cleanest solution for all analog standard-definition video transmissions going forward.

Besides MUSE (which, while component video, remained too expensive and niche for most Japanese after the economic bubble burst in the early 1990's), it wasn't until 1996 when DVD, with native component digital video, became available to the market. Terrestrial ATSC digital HD came to the US also in 1996 in digital component which caused some manufacturers to start adding component inputs to all TVs...but all remaining LD player manufacturers were Japanese. The more-widely-accepted Japanese ISDB digital HD didn't come to Japan until 2004, long after LD was, for all intents and purposes, dead. The writing was on the wall by the mid-90's that analog was dying. "Long live the native component digital formats!," they cheered. No more effort was placed into improving analog video or adapting it to an RGB/component world.

tl;dr: RGB/component is a pain to extract from composite. S-Video was to be the new (Japanese) standard until digital happened and killed all hope for a better analog future faster than Speedy Gonzales on a bullet-train.

Keep in mind. Years back CC did not come through the HDMI cables.
You have to use the Yellow component cable for the CC. And 95% of the new TVs now do not have
the R/W/Y component cable hookups now.
CC & SDH now come through the HDMI cables now. And your new TV's can decode things.
But all my TV's have both HDMI & Component setups. You just really need to look to find a TV with the
Component cable set up.

So i went back to just using straight composite input and honestly i think it looks better/clearer/less distorted and jittery than S-Video upscaled to HDMI.

I can still switch my inputs to Coaxial to get AC-3 DD sound when needed, but for most discs, the analog sounds and picture are ideal.

I think i was trying to re-invent the wheel and too many signal filters were making things worse not better.

I suggest anyone with 1-3 go betweens for their image signal try to just get as direct an analog signal as possible to their TV and see how it looks. You might be pleasantly surprised.