For any of you guys that aren't doing this at work (like me) there are a few things that are important if you want to get a decent archival copy for yourself.
1) Calibrate your systems.
This means setting up your computer monitor and your capture system so that the colours and greyscale are correct befor you begin. Otherwise what looks red on your monitor may look pink on another with disastrous results.
For the home user calibrate your monitor and graphics card first. You can get an inexpensive calibration tool such as the colorvision Spyder (or rent one) and use its automated setup. If you don't have the cash, then at least run through the configuration for your graphics card to set up your colour profiles. Most Nvidia and Radeon cards have a reasonable adjustment tool built in.
Then at the very least grab the video essentials laserdisc and calibrate your input side. (It costs about $25 online)
Do NOT use an LCD monitor, the colour and contrast ratios are too far off for video work.
Then of course you can calibrate your TV as well to view the final product, the Avia Test DVD suite is very good for this.
Even if you never get round to making the bootleg, the upside of all this is that your system will look better than it ever has for all PC work, and your TV will look great also!
2) Use a lossless codec
When capturing from lasedisc, you want to get the best quality you can. At work this means capturing uncompressed.
At home with normal equipment, you can get a manageable filesize by using a lossless codec like Huffyuv or one of the others out there. This way you are not throwing away any detail like you would be if using a lossy compression mechanism, but can still fit each episode onto a 250GB disc.
3) Use a decent encoder with VBR.
When you finally have finished your masterpiece and want to put it out to DVD, use a decent multipass VBR encoder.
If you are working on PC, then the cinemacraft encoder is a very nice tool for this. Adobe encore 1.5 also does a pretty good job. I'm not sure if any of the free encoders on the PC are any good, but asking questions in a place like doom9.org would be a good place to start.