I recently accuired a LD-X1 from Yahoo auctions. Player is working fine but the picture quality is so-so, worse than my Pioneer 504. There is a lot of smearing, much more than my 504 and also some king of ghosting going on. For example if there's a object on the screen, just to the right of the object you can see a shadow "copy" of the object. I'm fairly confident that it can and should be able to produce a lot better picture than my 504 at least.

Any one know what adjustments to start with to try to fix this?

Don't adjust anything, I believe from what I've read this is one of a handful of players that have a coating on the laser itself
DO NOT USE ALCOHOL to clean the laser.

Make sure this is not a user error before you start to adjust stuff, it could be your cables, it could be dirty contacts.
Ghosting depending on how bad you see it is normal on Laserdisc, if its major like old TV then its your cables.

You just paid XX for a player that originally cost 400,000Y this would have been close to 3500 back in the day, with
inflation today this is almost 8000.00 US dollars.

DO NOT DESTROY THIS PLAYER since it doesn't look as good as a bluray player.

I've seen too many who have destroyed perfectly good players on this forum.
I'm no tech but don't destroy it.

I doubt it has to do with a dirty lens, but yes, it is supposed to have a coating on it and you're only supposed to clean it with distilled water.

I'm not expecting it to be bluray, that is not why I'm in to laserdisc I was however expecting to get better video out of it than my Pioneer CLD-504 laserdisc player.

Contacts are clean and I'm using the same (high quality) composite cable that iuse with my CLD-504 and the smearing/ghosting is really bad compared to the 504.

OK Thx.

I would also try the settings on your TV or projector that you are using, you may need to change settings on the video.
Unless you can post some images its hard to figure out your issues.

There's a thread here where it was the capacitors causing issues (which wouldn't be much fun) although the symptoms are perhaps different.

[LD-X1] Video problem

Attaching a photo I took.

You can see that the colors are misaligned, a lot of green to the right of the letters and also a lot of smearing.

Im wondering if this setting could have anything to do with the shadow/ghosting.

If you do monkey with anything be sure to have a disc with test patterns. Calibrating to a movie is not a great idea since no LD is perfect.

Why is your brightness so blasted?

Please don't adjust for one single disc at the beginning of the film where it says FOX.
Try some other cables, I really think that's the issue.
You are going to turn this into a door stop like someone else did with theirs.
Get a lot of info first before you start adjusting without a test disc and without a scope and not knowing what you are doing, please.

Apologies if already asked but couldn’t see anything mentioned above. Did you check to see if there was any noticeable difference when connecting between the units composite or s-video outputs?

Brightness looks blasted because of shutter time on camera to be able to get a good photo on CRT TV.

Agreed. I tried some other LDs and it seems the ghosting is actually more of a problem with that particular LD, although much more noticable on the LD-X1 compared to my CLD-504. Smearing is still the same though on other LDs, less noticeable when lowering brightness of course. I have tried different cables and also s-video but the smearing stays the same. I'm also seeing faint faint horizontal lines all over the image, they stay in the same place and do not move around.

Tried with s-video also, the smearing and and ghosting is the same but with overall much worse and grainy picture on s-video. I have not been able to try the BNC output yet though, need a BNC>Composite converter. BNC is supposed to skip the overlaystuff and outputs the "Raw" video signal

The X1 does not output raw video, all outputs are digitized for time base correction, digital noise reduction, and this actually improves edge enhancement to give a sharper looking picture. As you stated the BNC video2 and s-video2 both bypass the character generator and this does help as in the X1 and U.S. LD-S2 the character generation is performed after the digital signal is recombined. So raw from the disc to digital to analog to character generator or bypass character generator. Newer players do the character generation while the signal is digital.