captainsolo said:

Since you're capturing straight to a DVD recorder, I don't think there's much more you can do to improve things. From what I always understood there's only so much that those can handle.

I think DVD recorders have come a long way since the early players hit the market, some players comb filters can be very good. Look at the captures SilverWook, Jaitea and Nerfherder made of THX 1138, looks pretty damn good to me. All captured on recorders. Some good examples by Moth3r in this thread: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Laserdisc-players-screenshot-comparison/topic/12907/

In the end you will always need to do some post processing to get LD-captures to look any good, tweak the levels, multi-cap average/median, IVTC and resize etc. The clipped white levels have nothing to do when the transfer was made, there are shitty transfers made today just like there were good ones made in the old days. Could be just that LD pressing as mine doesn't look like that at all, quality of recorder/player. Be sure to turn off all "picture enhancements"-presets on your Laserdisc player if you have any, besides the clipped white levels it looks oversharpened.

Otherwise you could always track down a new copy of that LD (Pioneer-pressing), the SWE LD's are very common and are often up on ebay.