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DVD and Laserdisc

The difference between Laserdisc and DVD is similar to the difference between vinyl records and the compact disc.  The vinyl record is analogue and the CD is digital 1's and 0's.  In technical terms an NTSC Laserdisc has a pixel aspect ratio of 567x480 and DVD has a pixel aspect ratio of 720x480.  The Laserdisc has 425 lines of horizontal resolution and a DVD disc has 500 lines. Luminesce (black & white) frequency response for a laserdisc is 5.5 MHz and DVD is 6.75 MHz.  Laserdisc suffers from noise inherent in analogue video,  DVD uses Digital MPEG-2 compression, most professionals agree that when a DVD is carefully encoded it is virtually indistinguishable from the master.

The following DVD and Laser  frames are a true representation of picture quality.  They were digitised from the YC outputs of both players via an Iomega Capture Card and Adobe Premiere.  The Laserdiscs are NTSC and the DVDs are Region 1.  The black level and colour balance were adjusted.

VHS and DVD

The difference between VHS and DVD is not only the obvious quality loss, but the Widescreen aspect ratio, anamorphic transfers to video tape are sometimes distorted to fit more image in a 4:3 picture area, the characters look thin.  In technical terms DVD has up to 500 horizontal lines compared to 240 for VHS.  DVD has a chroma (colour) frequency response of 3.3 MHz compared to 500 KHz for VHS.  Luminesce (black & white) frequency response for DVD is 6.75 MHz and VHS is 2.5 MHz.

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