I am assuming the widescreen releases are only using a portion of those 450 lines though, because the lines on top and bottom are filled with black. What I mean is, maybe 50 lines of black on top and 50 black lines on bottom and then whatever is left is 350 lines of a widescreen image in the middle. On a 4:3 image, you have the complete 450 lines for the displayed picture.

Do I understand this correctly, or do these use 450 lines for the widescreen image and somehow fill the top and bottom with black in some other way?



yes this is a great guide!

Nope. I believe Laserdisc on a good setup often has the best image quality ever available for many titles.

For example, the endless remasters of Macross: Do You Remember Love? , I have many of the DVD remasters but the best image is still the laserdisc Perfect CAV. It's literally perfect.

Also, sound. Sound is a big reason why Laserdisc is still the best format overall.

I agree. Lion king is like that for me. I remember when the DVD came out. The picture was so sharp and pristine it looked fake. The image on the CAV laserdisc is how I think the film should look. A lot of these Disney animated features were animated in a computer but ultimately copied to film for theatrical runs. When releasing the DVD they just port the digital files over. That film intermediary is what makes the movie feel alive. The purely digital DVD just came across as flat.

It's the DVNR. There's no film grain at all.

Yes its something like this.
Aren't you the one with an R7G???

You are correct. A fair chunk of LDs bandwidth was often devoted to generating black bars. There is no other way to do it. You lose those same lines zooming or not. They’re already devoted to black bars.

Most Hollywood movies are wide. All TVs back then where square, I challenge you to find a better way. For movie buffs the aspect ratio is way more important than resolution.

On televisions or monitors, aspect ratio management means linear and/or non-linear scaling of the digital image(yes LD is digital once in your TV) to fit to the aspect ratio of your television or monitor. There is no zooming or stretching. These are optical terms and done by optical lenses. You might talk about these on some projector as those can employ optical lenses to zoom, stretch or squeeze the light output of the projector. Nevertheless TV manufacturers use zooming, stretching or similar terms which is fine. It is probably less confusing this way to most consumers.

There are 4 US titles and about 10 or so JPN only titles which were mastered in “Squeezed” format. This is equivalent to anamorphic widescreen or widescreen enhanced on DVDs. Everything on these will look skinny on a 4:3 format older TV but once displayed on a modern widescreen TV, they will appear normal. The advantage is that they don’t need the black bars above and below unless the film is even wider ratio (ex. 21:9) that the typical widescreen TV (which is 16:9). These titles are extremely rare and very expensive when found.

All other LDs are 4:3 ratio (period). They either have black bars above and below to preserve the original aspect ratio or they don’t bother.

As mentioned above, LD is digital once in your TV. 420 scan lines of LD is somewhat equivalent to 420x480 interlaced pixels. As you can see, LD needs scaling even for a standard definition TV with 4:3 ratio. LD looks better on old TVs because the scaling multiplier is much smaller. It needs no scaling on the vertical axis (already 480 pixels) and needs a small amount scaling on the horizontal axis to go from 420 pixels to 640 pixels ( which makes 640x480 = 4:3).

On a wide screen display, horizontal scaling has a larger multiplier to reach 720 pixels. But if you are viewing a full screen LD, these additional pixels are black bars (assuming you are keep the 4:3 aspect of the material).

On a wide screen display while watching a letterboxed movie things get even more complicated. Remember above we said vertical resolution one to one matches 480 pixels hence no scaling needed, well now a good portion of this 480 pixels are black bars and our actual image resolution is far less around 360 pixels or less. If you subtract the horizontal black bars, we end up with a resolution of 420x360. Now much larger multiplier are needed on both axis of scaling. I think now you get the idea.

Let’s talk about scaling. It’s not simply adding random pixels. You have to run some algorithms and predict the characteristics of these new added pixels. LD has much less than half a megapixel count and going HD it need over 2 megapixels. This added 1.5 megapixels aren’t extracted information from the original but literally “guessed” information. Better scaling algorithms better guess what the next pixel should be before adding to the picture.

For example is Sony is doing something called “Super Bit Mapping”. Since Sony owns film studios, they have the luxury to down scale their master copies of their films to 1080p for Blu-ray or 480i for DVD and have the exact reverse of the same down scaling algorithm in their TVs and Blu-ray players. In theory, this reverse algorithm unfolds the down sized image using the same formulas hence comes very close to original.

I wouldn't say often. The majority of titles available on LD you'd probably be better off watching on Blu-ray or even DVD, if picture quality were your primary concern. Perhaps occasionally you will get transfers that overdo it with DVNR or screw up the colour timing; it happens (the fact that this happened to most of the Star Trek films annoys me a lot; but even then you can get earlier versions unsullied with these problems on DVD which are still therefore of higher picture quality than the LD). But I don't think this is anywhere near the majority of titles.


In terms of the stereo CD quality uncompressed audio, yeah, LD is pretty nice. But I don't think it's substantially nicer than Blu-ray these days. The problem of film soundtracks having their dynamic range compressed for home releases has largely gone away though I believe with Blu-ray players now having the option to automatically compress the soundtrack. And when it comes to surround sound setups, LD is no better than DVD or Blu-ray and infinitely harder to set up. Again, there might be occasional screw-up with the sound mix on individual titles, where some enterprising engineer think they know better than the original sound designers, but by and large these are in the minority.

In terms of things like animation, this is where LaserDisc is likely to shine due to the lack of DVNR, the problems with MPEG2 compression on DVDs not being great for animation, and the fact that most animation doesn't need to be particularly high resolution for your mind to be able to fill in the rest. I do enjoy watching The Lion King on LaserDisc though I never consciously noticed anything with regards to the picture quality; it's more because I own the beautiful CAV boxset release.

Don't get me wrong, I do love LD for many reasons, most explained in prior posts. But ultimately on today's TVs, unless your eyesight is particularly poor, 268 lines of horizontal resolution (for a 2.39:1 film on an NTSC LaserDisc) is not ideal for a live-action film heavy on impressive visuals. It was the best folks at home had in the 1990s, of course.

My vote is for DVD or Blu-ray too. There was an era you could buy a ton of LDs for $1 each. In that era we would call out any above $100 sale for a rare title absolutely ridiculous. That era is over. Even common titles are $10-20 and anything somewhat rare is automatically $100 or so. Now DVDs are dirty cheap. So are used Blu-rays. There aren’t really all that many exclusive to LD content, cut, and supplementaries as people think of. Most of those have been released and re-released on Blu-ray. Today there is less and less reasons to start collecting LDs beside nostalgia and high curiosity.

I have said it elsewhere before. Different color timing, DNR, near field mixes, these are all due to the era. If LD lived on, they would get the same treatment. On the technical side of things, this has been discussed a million times, LD does not have better picture than DVD or Blu-ray. Technical specifications easily tell you this and so are your eyes.

Audio on BD is fantastic. All the issues of DVD are gone.

@Substance: You are somewhat right on the price thing but I have also acquired many for dirt cheap. Some LDs are ridiculous and there is some muscle memory with prices. IE a good BD finally comes out but the LD still has a high asking price (typically with less sales). If I could easily get $10-20 for random common LDs I would list probably 50 LDs on eBay today and replace them with BDs. I don't think it's very possible though. Where I would agree is that ultimately there isn't much of a reason to get into LD now. I love LD for old animation and being able to start the movie right away.

I think it's unfair to say LD is just worse than DVD. It's mostly preference there and there are many very bad DVDs. A well done DVD will look better on a newer TV though no doubt. No contest with BD though, it's better hands down.

I never fully understood what a squeeze Laserdisc really was. I guess I was overthinking it. Thinking it was some sort of technical term relating to how much they could squeeze into a LD. I happen to own all 4 US releases just out of happenstance. I thought it was pretty cool that the reference numbers were sequential. When I watched Grumpy Old Men a couple years back the video seemed fine...

16902 is a mystery though. I would love to know the story behind it.

I agree with some of what you say but you fail to realise that LD is not about resolution, it's an analogue RF picture, not digital, and that is very important when you're watching old content.The picture on LD is the picture, not pixels or compression ratios or anything. LD has a quality to it that any digital format can never have.

nope, you are mistaking me for someone else



Thats pretty smart, but have they been doing this same algorithm since the launch of DVD?
Maybe all video content producers agree on the same algorithm, this way all video scale back right.



I am only guessing that people who still watch LD are video hobbyist or for the nostalgia. Purchasing large CDs and storing them to play on a 2 decade-old multi-hundred dollar player approaching death that only output in RCA which some modern TVs might not accept to produce an image quality that is substandard to DVD quality does not make sense. Its so much easier to stream a 4K movie from your $10 Netflix subscription.

That being said, some people get a kick out of the older look, like those who enjoy watching a horror movie on VHS, which bring us back again to...its a video hobbyist or nostalgia thing.

The vast majority of films I own on LD are not available on Netflix. Most of the LDs I own cost me $1 or less which is cheaper than renting the streaming version for $3 or so.

Netflix sucks for a lot of reasons. I'd pay $30 for a good blu ray many times over before even considering it.

And I've been picking up DVDs for super cheap, sometimes a quarter each.
Much cheaper than netflix, but doing the free roku and its OK right now for the past week.

No, it's not a nostalgia thing, or a gimmick, it's the best way to watch a lot of content. I was watching Godzilla vs Space Godzilla CAV last night. Crystal clear, natural picture, zero chance of digital artefacts or macroblocking on dark areas, natural skin tones, just perfection.

I'll always have physical media if I love the content too, I'll never get netflix. It's important for me to own and have total control over the work. No matter who owns the rights today or what a director or a releasing company decide to do to change it or make it available or not available I have an untouchable copy of the version I want until I die.

LD is the best physical media to feel like you actually own that copy. It goes straight to the content, no BS, no warnings. Just the content.

Spot on forper.....

You touched on the WHOLE reason LaserDisc resonates with me.
The liner notes, extra content, and /or photo inserts are icing on a wonderful cake.
The cake being the silver platters of goodness holding images of our planets past artistry !

I have assembled a vast collection of Kaiju from my young days growing up.
Lived for Gamera, Godzilla, and any and all dinosaur movies showing up at the theaters !

Now, as time and space has allowed, many of my most cherished monster movies live on my shelves able to be accessed on a whim......

As it stands, since you mentioned, Godzilla vs Gigan is beckoning !

Cheers to the LDDB membership !

I like to own my physical copies too. How long will they remain operational is a question I often ask though. I hope a very long time.