SilverWook said:

I admit I used to lust after some Sony broadcast monitors back in the day. The colors were beautiful.

There is an old trick to burn out a screen burn, but I don't know if you can run another video source into an arcade monitor.

The GOUT bypassed the problems inherent in an LD transfer. (A couple low rent outfits like Full Moon have allegedly released some of their films straight off an LD capture.) With a non anamorphic letterbox master, you have to take into account how many scanlines a 2:35.1 movie is actually using. Those larger letterbox bars are wasted dead space in a DVD encode.

The best CRT displays ever made still set the standard for overall picture quality. But regardless of that, I simply hate the look of digital displays; I feel like I'm looking at a glorified calculator or digital watch.

Mild screen burn can be evened-out, but it is destructive (i.e., you burn other parts of the screen to even things out). Screen-burn is a result of depleted phosphors, and it is irreversible for all intents and purposes (the tube would have to be remanufactured; recoated internally with phosphor to fix it, which isn't particularly feasible).

And yes, but the 1993 and 1995 LaserDiscs were also 4:3 letterbox, which is inherently worse than a 4:3 letterbox DVD (all else being equal), due to LaserDisc's lower resolution and inferior color separation. The LaserDiscs did have better audio, though they could have fit uncompressed PCM audio on the GOUT as well had they wanted to (and it is easy to do yourself if you have a rip of the LaserDisc PCM audio).

The GOUT was as good as it gets given the source they used (D1 tape, the same or nearly the same resolution as NTSC DVD). They didn't skimp on the MPEG-2 bitrate either; the video streams alone on all three of them are over 6 GB.