Reply 1400 of 27591, by Standard Def Steve
What better day than Canada Day to stay home and do some Laserdisc vs DVD comparisons? 😁
When DVD was first introduced quite a few Laserdisc fanboys claimed that the LD format produced a nicer, more film-like picture. I can now say without a doubt that's an absolute lie. 😀
I compared five movies on LD and DVD - E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Fantasia, Toy Story, and Dazed & Confused. I also played the Blu-Ray editions of Jurassic Park and Toy Story. I played roughly 15 minutes of video from each disc, on two different setups:
Setup 1:
Display: Samsung 64" F8500 1080p plasma
A/V Receiver: Marantz SR5008
LD player: Panasonic LX-900, connected to A/V Receiver via composite video and optical digital audio. 1080p output to TV via HDMI.
DVD player: HTPC, playing DVDs ripped to 480p H.264 (~3.0Mb/s) and retaining the original AC3 or DTS stream. Using MPC-HC with LAV for video decoding and audio bitstreaming, and madVR as the output video renderer.
BD player: HTPC, playing BDs ripped to MKV format and retaining the original AVC/VC-1 video stream and TrueHD/DTS-MA audio stream. Using MPC-HC with LAV for video decoding and audio bitstreaming, and madVR as the output video renderer.
Setup 2:
Display: Panasonic Tau CT-34WX50 34" CRT
Audio: Kenwood UD-952 component system
LD Player: Panasonic LX-900, connected to television's S-Video input. Connected to Kenwood amplifier via stereo RCA outputs.
DVD player: Yamaha DVD-S2300MK2, outputting 480p via component video connection and stereo analog audio.
On setup 1, the difference between Laserdisc and DVD was huge. Laserdisc video was quite soft in focus, and there was some video noise. The animated film Toy Story was easily the best looking LD. The DVD rips played back from the HTPC simply looked worlds better than any of the laserdiscs. The picture was much sharper and exhibited no video noise. Color saturation was also much better - Toy Story looked ready to pop out of the screen! The large display did reveal some of the original MPEG-2 compression artifacts, although the deblocking filter I used during H.264 conversion masked some of the artifacts. MPEG-2 blockiness was absent from the laserdiscs, but I found the video noise on the LDs to be more distracting than the very minor MPEG-2 artifacts. The video noise was especially noticeable on the Fantasia LD.
The DVD rips outperformed the Laserdiscs in the audio department as well. Now, this was mostly because I didn't have an AC-3 demodulator for the LD player, so I had to listen to the stereo PCM tracks via the player's optical output. All of the LDs I tested had Dolby Surround encoded stereo tracks, so I used Dolby Pro Logic IIx on the receiver to open up the sound stage a little. Still, the 5.1 AC3 and DTS tracks on the DVD rips were simply more fun to listen to. The surround channels in particular were more convincing.
Not that Laserdisc audio is bad. Far from it! The Dolby Surround encoded PCM audio on the Jurrasic Park and Toy Story LDs were quite engaging, and worked well with DPLIIx upmixing. Even the best Hi-Fi VHS tapes weren't this good! Despite the absence of an LFE channel, the T-Rex stomps in Jurassic Park were able to give the subwoofer a pretty decent workout, as was the rocket scene in Toy Story. However, the Dolby Digital and DTS-MA tracks on the DVD and BD rips were even better, with each T-Rex stomp just shaking the room. The rocket scene in Toy Story was also far more of a blast on the DVD and BD formats, with plenty of sofa-shakeage and chest slam.
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Laserdisc fared better on Setup 2. The CRT display did a much better job of displaying the interlaced, analog video of LD. Video noise wasn't as apparent (though Fantasia still had quite a bit), and it all looked so much sharper on Setup 2. LD video color saturation was also much better on the second setup. Although the difference between LD and DVD was nowhere near as dramatic on setup 2, DVD video still won, easily. On setup 2, I played the DVDs directly through my Yamaha DVD player. The 480p component feed just looked gorgeous on the CRT. The Toy Story DVD was startlingly good--in fact it looked nearly HD with insane amounts of color "pop." None of the laserdiscs could match this level of image quality.
The difference between LD and DVD audio was also much less apparent on the second setup's 2-channel audio system. The biggest difference was in volume. The LDs were a little louder than the DVDs. However once the two formats were volume matched, they were similar in terms of audio quality. Once you take away the big subwoofer and surround channels, DVD and LD is fairly evenly matched. LD may even have a slight advantage here, as its stereo audio is uncompressed PCM, vs DVD's downmixed, lossy Dolby Digital.
Bottom line, DVD easily outperformed laserdisc, and the newer your playback equipment, the more Laserdisc, well, sucks. Yes, this was all rather pointless, but man did I have fun re-watching my favourite scenes from some of my favourite movies on different formats. 😊
94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!
