You don't have to adjust your TV on a movie by movie basis, but if you were to use, say, the AVS laserdisc to set up your TV and then use, say, digital video sesentials, you will find that the settings are not the same. The brightness will be set higher on the DVD because its capable of outputting a "blacker black" in the first place. If you used the same brightness setting on a DVD player as you would on an LD player, the LD would look washed out. Seeing as the video source of this is LD and not film (which has a higher dynamic range than both of these formats) you must account for the fact that there is no shadow detail to be reclaimed. SO, then people say "why not just clip the signal so what was 7 IRE on the LD is now 0 IRE on the DVD." The problem with that is that when you hard clip an image, that is detail that can't be brought back. The reason why its so hard to make the starfield visible is because the difference between the black of outerspace and the dark grey of the starfield is not different enough. Had it been a transfer from film, there would be a greater difference between the "blackest black" of the background and the stars. The only way to maintain it without clipping many of the stars to black is to adjust it in the ANALOG domain, whereby you have much more leeway. If you tweak the brightness setting on your TV, you can choose yourself whether you want ALL the shadow detail and stuff or whether you want the blackest blacks. However, if I were to adjust the black to be blacker for the DVD, it would mean NO one is gonna get quality star fields and everybody is gonna lose shadow details. Thats not a tradeoff i'm going to make, so I stuck to my plan of "DVD on LD."

As long as the video source is LD, black should NOT be 0 IRE, it should be 7 IRE.