Just an update. I'm still waiting on the video essentials laserdisc to arrive. The guy from LDDB swears up and down that he mailed it already and that it should be here before the end of the week.

I have been playing around with capturing on the Theater750 and I'm now almost 90% sure that the cld-hf9g does have almost pure composite out. It still passes through the chip that overlays the on screen display but I believe there is no filtering or y/c separation going on.

If I turn up the y & c noise reduction all of the way and then turn up the Y/C separation all the way to Max and then capture via an s-video cable I get a noise-free picture that still shows grain and a little blur from the 3d y/c separation. There is significant rainbowing however due to the fact that the comb filter is not the best but I haven't noticed much dot crawl problem.

However, If I keep the same settings and capture with the composite out I get a softer picture with more noise but without the rainbowing and no dot crawl. I'm assuming this is because it is being filtered out with the modern comb filter of the Theater750.

What I've done just playing around is turn off the HF9G comb filter but leave the noise reduction on. Then I did 3 composite caps, 3 s-video caps, toot them respectively and use the luma from the less noisy s-video cap and the chroma without the rainbowing from the composite cap. It looks pretty nice to my eyes and I don't feel like it needs any more processing other than a proper IVTC.

The difference is hard to spot spatially. The toot also seems to remove a lot of the rainbowing problem of the s-video caps. The screenshot below isn't much of an indicator but you can sort of see that the noise is lessened. I think the best part is that this looks natural compared to using a software denoiser. There is still grain, nothing looks plasticized, and no dvnr blurring.

EDIT: BTW, I should mention that when capturing I didn't have the noise reduction turned up all the way. I only used the first 2 out of 10 increments. If you turn it up past 7 it starts to blur.