http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/video/ghibli/ippai.html#ld_box
http://www.ex.org/1.5/24-ghibli.html
no one as far as i know has done any screen grabs or even posted the laserdisc cover art which is all gatefold and superb.
D2 masters were used.
as for the quality difference between the gout and the japan special collection and 1997 special edition, is mostly in the sound department. the japan pressings have awesome digital audio, and the 97 set features ac3 5.1.
unlike the us first issue releases in widescreen the special collection is in CAV format not CLV, it is free of the dvnr that plagues the THX laserdisc pressings.
Again before the advent of better hi def audio aka in HD-DVD and Blu Ray which can contain uncompressed PCM. dvd could only one up laserdisc in terms of picture quality while laserdisc always had a more robust audio performance.
The one time dvd tried to come close was in the superbit dvd era when they were releasing dts tracks in full bitrate.
The very early preference of laserdisc over dvd was in dvd's early days when mpeg2 artifacting was very bad on a lot of improperly mastered releases. Indeed most of the releases were simply the same d1 or d2 masters used for laserdisc mastering and were single layer.
It gets even stranger when you consider that some Laserdiscs have the proper screen ratio for the movies they have while the dvd's do not, and some Laserdiscs have incorrect ratios and the dvd releases corrected that.
I know of certain cases in the release of James Bond vs DVD for instance where this occured.
Sometimes even letterboxing titles cropped the image on certain titles on laserdisc loosing parts of the top or bottom or even side frames.
As for what Hi Vision was i believe it was a japan mastering system considered to be an early form of HD, it was a widescreen tv set i believe as well.
Its ironic that there is an ad on youtube where george lucas advertises it for the japanese.
I not sure but i guess some who owned the muse players in japan like the X-0 or X-9 must have also owned a hi vision set at one point.
By the way did i point out how extremely envious i am of anyone who can afford the thousands of dollar machines like the X0 Player.
IT is funny since i cannot even find an elite pioneer player for a decent price.
A lot of people must still either own or transfer laserdisc to dvd. Watching ebay auctions daily on vhs and laserdisc titles still selling like they are means the formats are far from obsolete as long as the have titles not on Blu Ray or DVD.
The biggest difference between the 1997 and 2004 special edition restorations is that the 1997 was mostly done by hand and mechanical processes as well as photo chemical not done all on a computer like Lowry.
YCM laboratories did the image restoration, YCM of course being a reference to the yellow, cyan, and magenta seperation masters used in film.
As to why their restorations turned vaders saber pink is beyond my limited understanding.
Lowry Just Scanned the supplied altered film nagative into their computers at 4k resolution, they did not do any of the new color correction or timing that was done by ILM and supervised by LUCAS.
How the picture looked before it was tampered with to make the colors try to match the digital coloring of the prequels we will probably never know.