Actually, the stair-step issue is with it being captured to DV (read ALL about it here). That's a problem with DV and it can only be masked with blur filters which do more damage to the rest of the picture than help the few problem areas, IMO. You gotta capture to a lossless codec to avoid these types of issues. This is what ended my mission for my own OT transfer. All I have is a DV capture device and it works great with the 99.9% of stuff I transfer as it's VHS and VHS just doesn't have the clarity to show this problem (at least not in my experience). The few LDs I transferred just weren't important enough for me to upgrade my whole computer system around to accomodate lossless capture. In my test OT transfers, I was able to actually get a (very, very) slightly sharper transfer than the TR47 set and this was after anamorphic scaling, but the vertical color banding just killed it for me and I gave up. It's actually not too bad on the Lou Reed concert LDs I transferred and doesn't bother me, but on a movie like SW with sabers, blasters, light-up panels, etc it just stuck out to me so much. The Dr Gonzo set doesn't show this problem at all that I can see, but it's so soft that it may have been blurred-away. I also have a Panny DVD recorder that I did a test transfer with and while I was quite happy with how well it could stay true to the LD picture (though when blown up to 8ft on my projector, I could tell that the DVD was a little softer), that was also the very problem that killed it for me, since the LD picture wasn't perfect. You can't color correct, scale, remove 3:2, frame accurate edit, blacken the bars, etc. I also wasn't able to get satisfactory MPEG encoding unless I went 2 DVDs w/ 2.0 AC-3 for each movie, while I could easily get even better encoding via PC on 1 DVD. And my recorder doesn't have a HD, so I can't edit the LD sides together (though even with an HD, you can only edit on I frames which almost always will leave you with some black screen or some missing frames).