Okay… newbie to Laserdiscs here… but I’m willing to learn…

I’m using a Pioneer CLD-S360 player which will load and start playback of any NTSC disc I put into the machine. I’m running RCA s-video and audio cables to a composite AV to HDMI converter but the picture is very, very noise (see photo) and the picture drops out every few seconds or so…

What am I doing wrong guys - or is it the player? Laser? Setup?

Did you try without the converter, directly to a display with S-Video or Composite inputs?

Julien

I’ve tried both. Using just s-video/audio RCA cables and with the converter HDMI setup. Both give similar results and performance unfortunately.

Looks like the disc or the laser is bad, I would say disc but could be something like capacitors.

Try other discs before you start adjusting anything on the player.
Do you hear any audio distortion when playing the LD, and how is it with CD playback.

If the sound of the disc is not distorted in any way and just the picture looks this bad, I would lean toward the video portion of the player having issues like worn capacitors (or even the power supply caps being bad).

A bad laser would affect both sound and picture. How does it play CD’s?

Upon further trial and error, I adjusted the pots on my pioneer and have managed to get the laser to read discs better than before (and it will now read and playback CDs which it wouldn’t do before. See new screenshots.
Can anyone suggest anything else? Obviously the laser isn’t the problem.
Will adjusting the pots completely solve the problem or is something else amiss?

If it's a focus/tracking issue, it might.

If the laser diode is dying, boosting it will only solve the problem until it deteriorates further.

Julien