When saying 'you' in the following comments, I mean anyone doing this stuff, not "you" as in any particular person. I tried typing it all as "when one does this and one does that, but I sounded like the Queen)The noise reduction is where I get the rub.
If you apply heavy noise reduction, then of course you can compress the image more - you are effectively 'posterising' the image, so creating larger areas of block colour, and therby making it more compressible.
Of course if you process an image to throw a lot of its detail away, then you won't see any quality difference between medium vs high bitrates *because the quality was already thrown out in the first step*. I now understand why there is no difference between DVD5 and DVD9 on your set.
With a good player and disc set, the noise is almost non-existent except for where it should be there (i.e. film grain)
The problem with noise reduction is that it always throws away *some* detail. No matter how good it is, it is impossible for an algorithm to fully discern between actual noise, and say, the subtle weave pattern of the fabric of a costume, fine detail in a cloud and film grain for instance. This usually looks fine on an average 20" TV, but on a big screen it looks soft, posterised and awful.
For example, if you are getting dot crawl then that needs to be fixed at the capture stage - if you try to fix it later with filters then you are once again throwing out detail along with the noise.
I agree that applying sharpening filters etc. in most cases causes problems in the other direction, it can emphasize any noise or abberations in the source footage. Colour grading is an important step though, as it is off on the original laserdiscs and can be brought into line for a much better result that actually improves the image without introducing other issues.
I enjoyed the original TR47 set, it was the first time I heard of DVD bootlegs, and was what got me involved in the first place but thought its video quality was its biggest problem. Your new set should be a huge leap over the old just by using the 97 and a capture card rather than DV capture. The CLD97 is a great unit. It still introduces some noise, as does the asus card, but far far better overall than the previous setup. It should look great.
I don't think anyone will scoff at not using an X0, (whoever does, feel free to donate one to the cause) but if you want to know what you would gain by going to the X0, its mostly greatly reduced noise, zero sparkle artifacts, and absolutely no comb issues. The laser machanism really picks up exactly what is on the disc, even if it is somewhat damaged. They are available, but they are outrageously expensive, the cheapest I have seen one lately is 3 Grand, so for most of us, borrowing one is the only option. The other option is to pick up a CLD-2950 and a PAL set of disks, it gives you better quality than the CLD-97 NTSC setup, but the difference is quite small indeed.
Everyone here needs to remember that all of us trying to save the OT in the best possible way do so out of our own pockets, many of us have sunk a horrible, wife unmentionable amount of money into trying to do this