They do.
They look softer than what I see on my TV when I play an LD.

Player: Pioneer DVL-919 (Composite)

Capture Device: Osprey 260e --> MadVR --> Potplayer (Screencap)

Movie: Tales from the Hood


Screenshots:

Thanks for not spamming us with 20 million maximum sized images. Your images look good. Close ups of faces always look so much better on LD than any other format imo. Coz of the natural colours, and of course the effectively unlimited subtlety of analogue colour separation LDs present, humans look much more..human.

You keep talking about analog video like it's magic. It isn't. Just because it uses voltage levels instead of integers doesn't mean it has infinitely fine precision or "effectively unlimited subtlety." Color in analog video is in fact extremely limited in subtlety because the equipment to record and reproduce it simply isn't that good.

And even if you're thinking about a color gradient on a single scanline displayed on a CRT, it's not like you're actually going to see a perfectly smooth transition from one shade to the other because you've got red, green, and blue phosphors breaking it up. That's not even taking into account the variation in how correct those shades are going to be just from noise and the state of the equipment.

Now flip the gradient so it's going vertically. Whether you're talking digital or analog, NTSC or PAL, interlaced or progressive, you're looking at a fixed number of horizontal lines on the screen that can make up that gradient. It's not going to make a bit of difference whether each line is fed a digital signal or an analog one: The number of lines is how many steps there are going to be in that gradient at a given moment. Not continuous, not infinitely precise, not magic.

I don't know why I'm writing any of this when it isn't going to change anyone's mind. Guess it's like scratching an itch.

Never said analogue was infinitely precise, it's infinitely variable with perfect blending, not the closest approximation of changes in colour, as digital is and will always be.

It's like AI, it can never be human, it can only approximate a human because it is fundamentally different.

Digital can never emulate analogue because it is fundamentally a different thing.

Analogue video and sound is also closer to the real world because the real world is an infinite uncompressed continuous stream, just like analogue signals.

Learn with your eyes and ears, not theories and numbers.

I do see what you mean. I think Hauppauge PVR is causing it to be softer looking. What could I do to combat that? Maybe turn the sharpness up all the way on my CLD-99? I have the remote that works with it and I believe there's a setting to increase sharpness or would this be pretty much pointless because whatever Hauppuage PVR is doing is causing it to blur a little?