Monthly Archives: July 2013

Laserdisc Players and Comb Filters

With the recent demise of two of my Laserdisc players while writing an article about Se7en, I took the plunge and got a couple of ‘fresh’ ones. Pondering how best to make use of these players got me started thinking about comb filters. I’d always wanted to get a better comb filter to use with my older players, but never got around to doing much about it.

Having a bit of free-time and cash on my hands – I decided to do a bit of group test. During testing I managed to resurrect my two dead players (Hint: 220v players don’t work well for long on 100v !)

The following equipment will be put to the test:

  • Pioneer HLD-X9
  • Pioneer CLD-D925 (Dual PAL/NTSC player)
  • Pioneer CLD-939 (Japanese Pioneer CLD-97)
  • Farojida LD-1000 (Tweaked Pioneer CLD-99)
  • Leitch DPS-575 (Timebase corrector and 3D comb filter -> SDI)
  • Snell and Wilcox TBS-185 Kudos Plus (Timebase corrector and 3D comb filter -> SDI)
  • Sony HX-903 LCD Television
  • CYP SY-P295N S-video and composite to HDMI converter

Effectively this is a group test of all of these components, which I have seen discussed on many forums – but never actually reviewed !

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What did Atom Egoyan ever do to Orange and Teal ?

Atom Egoyan’s powerful, and often disturbing early work has just been released on Blu-ray. Unfortunately something more troubling than massively dysfunctional relationships lurks at the heart of these releases. I take a very quick look at these releases.

I discovered Atom Egoyan in the summer of 2000. It was a very formative year for me, through work I had the opportunity to spend three months living in New York, soaking up the atmosphere at ground level in one of the best cities on the planet.

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Laserdisc CLV Smear Myth or Reality ?

CLV Smear is often mentioned when discussing laserdisc players. I’m currently in the process of writing an enormous article comparing various NTSC comb filters. As part of that I’ve been comparing my various Laserdisc players. After reading about CLV smear I wanted to explore it a bit more and confirm a few facts. I can best describe CLV smear as a tendency for high contrast areas to faintly smear to the right during playback of CLV discs on most Laserdisc players. I’ve seen this being attributed to high frequency boosting applied to the signal from CLV discs by players to increase high frequency response. This boosting is generally not applied to CAV discs (except at the very start) since the high frequency response is generally much better. So – Is CLV Smear real ? Does the player make a difference ? Is it baked into the disc ? Read on… Continue reading →