Looking for opinions and/or advice on improvements. I've been trying different hardware and filter methods over the years, and I've kind of settled right now on this chain:

DVL-919 s-video -> Hauppauge Impact-VCBe -> lossless capture in VDub -> Neat Video 5 noise reduction

And if the intended target isn't DVD-R, I deinterlace with ffmpeg's nnedi module. Otherwise, I leave interlacing intact so that the DVD player can do it.

Sample capture from the demo clips part of the Video Essentials LD:

http://xtulator.com/ld/ld-test.mkv

For whatever reason, this particular LD has a slight shakiness to the top quarter of the picture when I capture it. It's not too bad, but I haven't had any other discs do that...

That looks familiar, pretty sure i have that disc. Is that "Video Essentials" or "A video Standard"? I could probably do a comparison capture, although i haven't been de-interlacing / ffmpegging.

It looks good, but "soft" to me. Hard to say where you are losing resolution, could be that way out of the player, could be the noise reduction.

I don't know of an easy/cheap way to make it better! There are a few hard/expensive ways. Mod your player, do an RF capture, ld-decode. Otherwise, different hardware, but the good stuff is hard to come by now.

check here: The Laserdisc Screenshot Thread