Hi Jetrell

From what I can tell on the net, the AG-1980 is really a very good deck and uses a very similar chasis as the PAL FS100/FS200 machines which are also rated very highly. Sweet.

Sorry to tell you that the TBC/DNR stuff on the VCR only works on tape playback and will not fix an incoming signal. This means that looping the video from your LD player through the VCR will not have any effect WRT TBC/DNR etc. It may even degrade the signal, but you'd have to try it to find out. You may find that the best option is to capture the LD signal as clean as possible and do some post processing with Avisynth to lower noise etc.

As far as upgrades for the DVL-90 machine goes, I'm not aware of anything specifically mentioned for this player. Alek talks about some interesting things to have a go at for improving the over all picture quality of LD players in his thread here (very interesting and definitely worth a read).

From what I can tell from the reviews of the DVD/LD combo players, they all compromise on both DVD and LD playback. If you are unhappy with the quality of picture from the DVL-90 then it may be simpler and cheaper just to go for a better dedicated LD player.

As mother said, LD is a composite format and it may be that the best picture from the DVL-90 is from the yellow composite output. You may want to just try it and see how it compares to the S-video output. Interestingly, Moth3r did a comparison on this thread between S-video and composite output on his D925 awhile ago which you might find helpful.

Hope this helps.