Originally posted by: Knightmessenger
Did the X0 team test out as many laserdisc players as they could find? How many did you test?Or was it already known that the X0 is the best? Have you thought about sending a rating list to the LD database or something?
I know sometimes you tell by just looking that one playback device (laserdisc, dvd, vcr and others) is better than another but what would you do with the ones that were really close? Are there any photo editing tools that could highlight a slight difference? I know from the X0 site that cranking up the saturation is one. I took screencaps of the exact same frame from 3 different Hi8 cameras using s-video with each. Although they don't look exactly the same, I really can't tell if one camera capture is better than the other.

We did test a lot of players I personally checked the X0 against the X9, and we have looked at the 95, 97, 99, 704, most of the elite series, the V800, the V8000 the V4300D, the CLD-925, the CLD-2950 and a piece of crap Sony.

If you want to test players you need a few items.

1) A really good capture card - you don't want the capture card giving you problems.
2) The Video Essentials laserdisc.

Then you can capture test patterns like standard colourbars, S&W etc. and you can check resolution, colour reproduction, cross talk etc. in an empirical way. You can also calibrate your system to make sure the image is a good as you can get it.

Basically the 4300D and V8000, V800 outperformed all of the consumer LD playes we checked, the X9 was better but the X0 outperformed them all.
For capture I wouldn't bother with any of the consumer models.