Hey guys is this normal for this player to exhibit this?

You'll have to look closely to notice it


I uploaded a video of the problem but it looks like Youtube video encoding may have blurred it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XJUdTArDh0

is this a known issue with a fix?

This looks like some sort of cable/grounding intereference, it's different from the other 515/925 problems I've seen.

Do you have any hi-res test patterns from a test disk? (Pioneer, AVS, VE, THX patterns...)

Unfortunately I don't, only the colour bars from The Terminator LD.

Probably worth noting that this interference doesn't appear when playing PAL LD's either.

Color bars would be fine for spotting the fine interference pattern, it's just not able to show ghosting/ringing.

I was assuming the lines would always be there even if there wasn't a disk playing - if it's only with NTSC, that's really not good. Might be able to salvage it with better alignment?

I'm getting increasingly convinced the 515/925 are simply flawed players for NTSC. If the audio channels really aren't being filtered, the interference would be in the 6-7mhz range, which probably wouldn't show up on the TV's of the time, but HD's are not so forgiving...

The bars are there all the time but only when it is in NTSC mode and they are more noticeable when using S-Video, Composite seems to hide them. I'm guessing because the picture isn't as sharp.

I'm not sure it is an alignment issue, I have played around with the video output level and that does move the bars from left to right and if you turn the video level all the way up it seems to get rid of the bars. But the picture doesn't look right if you do that.

Do you see it during playback? The blue screen is generated by the
player most likely in RGB and then sent to an NTSC encoder IC.

I also dabble in older video game consoles and the encoder IC used in the first model of the Sega Genesis (Megadrive) produces similar artifacts.

It is visible during playback. I'm aware of the jailbars on Sony RGB encoder chips on consoles but it seems different here.

The jailbars on consoles is much more fine.

Actually the worst player I've seen for ghosting is the LD-V8000. This is not that bad and can vary depending on the movie. Everything else looked fine so I would try to not look at it and just enjoy the player. If you really look hard at players there are scenes in movies that can show ghosting on every player. Just make sure your black levels are set correctly and don't turn up the sharpness on the monitor.

It's a pity though, since it's the biggest thing keeping the V8000 from being considered a top-level player. Overall the ringing is an artifact of something very useful though - changes in brightness are emphasized on the disk, so smaller noises get filtered out. But getting the de-emphasis just right is insanely hard, and the ringing happens when the de-emphasis filter is still active even after the signal settles back down.

In the V8000's case the ringing might have been a semi-deliberate side effect of reducing chroma noise - a review in The Perfect Vision had the V8000 clobbering a whole bunch of high end players (including the S2 and CLD-97, IIRC) on it.

Back to the 515/925, at the time they were made the 6-7mhz noise from not filtering NTSC analog audio (much) was probably only really a problem on professional level equipment. The comb filtering on the TV is probably what reduces it on the composite output.

Overall, filtering is an interesting balancing act - and the 515/925 is a bit tipsy.