Comparing and contrasting the original Star Wars on the VHS and LaserDisc home video formats. Enjoy! All rights go to Lucasfilm and Disney. I OWN NOTHING.
Shame because I genuinely enjoy and watch 4:3 on a CRT to this day, retro anime and some films just look the best that way Couldn't go back and watch DBZ or Cowboy Bebop cropped again in 16:9
@Mammoth Supremacy 55 VHS doesn't have common S-video support, or its really rare, But I mean I think it's fair, it's to show which one is better, and S video support clearly show's it's better
Laserdisc tho a smaller screen had more definition than the VHS ever did ! I wish I could have owned one at the time it came out but I wasn't born yet haha
Smaller screen??? The video clearly shows that the laserdisc has a wider screen the only reason that the vhs is covers the whole screen is that it’s a zoomed in version of the laser disc screen (a.k.a widescreen) Edit: I Just realized that people in the 80’s didn’t have widescreen TVs so on a. Normal box Tv it would appear smaller my bad. But the point still stands that nowadays with a modern Tv the laserdisc takes up more space than a VHS would
@@DrRichardCranium It's not a minor step up. Picture quality is significantly better and VHS movies were always cropped to 4:3. Laserdisc players were the same price as VHS players and buying a movie on laser disc was cheaper than buying it on VHS. People just couldn't afford both and laser discs couldn't record, that's pretty much the only reason VHS did better.
I have the Special Edition Trilogy on VHS and Laserdisc. While the LD version is better, the VHS really isn't a slouch. It looks great for the format and sounds great too. I watch both on my 4K tv and despite being analog, they look fine. A VHS in good quality and recorded in SP mode looks decent. It also helps to keep your vcr heads clean. So I open mine once in a while and clean them with a cloth and alcohol.
It appears that the VHS version used for this demonstration is from the Post-1995 remastered releases. Prior VHS releases framed the right side of the widescreen frame so that the moon on frame left was cropped out.
i dont get why vhs tapes didnt have letter box aspect ratios, i guess it was to get more resolution plus filling the frame. they basically made a separate cut of the movie, if you look at 1:39 there are 2 cuts for the same shot.
Actually, there were widescreen vhs tapes. They weren't as common as widescreen laserdisc but I have collected some. Among the widescreen vhs tapes I had were Blade, The Matrix, Soldier, Rush Hour, Dark City, and a few others.
Even with reduced vertical resolution due to letterboxing, Laserdisc is clearly sharper. It's a shame that more anamorphic 16:9 LD's weren't produced, but LD's sunset coincided with HDTV's (and so widescreen's) dawn so it is what it is.
The video is definitely better on laserdisc and in real life the sound is better also. I have a huge LD collection and love it. Normal dvd and Blu-ray are better quality picture. But there's a charm to LD. And the sound is unique on these. Compared to any other dvd or Blu-ray. Analog video and sound. Compared to digital. It's just cool 😎👍
comparing LD to Bluray is just nonsense though. There's a huge technological gap between those 2, if anything you ought to compare LD to DVD to make it fair
High quality, CAV laserdisc sets cost up to $100, although they had perfect mastering. The most notable one was "The Abyss" set where James Cameron made pretty nasty comments about VHS in the liner notes. It also was the only version with something like 30minutes of extra footage. I felt the video quality to first gen DVD from CAV was actually inferior due to excessive compression in early mastering of DVDs. Why videophiles always had copies of Fifth Element to show off their sets.
blasterman789 Cameron was very big on Laserdisc exclusives. His director’s cuts of “Aliens,” “The Abyss” and “T2” were all Laserdisc exclusives for at least their first year on the market.
Isn't there a widescreen vhs release of this movie? It would be interesting to compare the widescreen vhs vs the laserdisc version. Obviously i'd imagine laserdisc would look better. Also, I'm pretty sure it's harder to see differences through videos like this. I can say as a laserdisc player owner that laserdisc destroys vhs. Laserdisc is a weird in-between vhs and dvd quality. In my opinion it's a bit better than vhs but dvds typically beat laserdisc by a decent margin depending on the movie.
You shouldn't use the S-Video connector on the LaserDisc. The signal on the disc is composite. The player will just run it through a comb filter when outputting on S-Video.
Only negative is some are susceptible to disc rot because of poor manufacturing techniques allowing the aluminum reflective layer to oxidize. VHS, being magnetic tape, normally does not have these issues unless you are dealing with poor storage.
I've always wondered. If they used a 2x anamorphic squeeze on the video they could essentially use the full available line resulotion. And then during playback you could squeeze it back down to 2.4:1 (or whatever you prefer as your scope-definition). Using that, you could get the perks of supersampling for an image that would be essentially clean from noise and finely detailed. And for enthusiasts with crt-projectors they could have used 2x adaptors to unsqueese the image optically to get a great (for the time) image. Everything without actually adding anything to the video signal itself. You could play these squeeze discs from any normal player. Of course. High quality scalers were a pain to find, afford and use... so that's probably why noone really tried it. Yes I do know later on there was 1.33x squeezed video for widescreen TV's but still... And today... with people having ultrawide screens and home cinemas with UHD projectors. We still are caught in one exact resolution and everything else has to waste pixels on black rectangles. Meaning that Hateful 8 shot on 70mm with 1.25x squeeze for a 2.76:1 image ends up on BluRay having a resolution of 1 920 x 696 = 1 336 320 out of the possible 1 920 x 1 080 = 2 073 600 pixels wasting at least a third of the possible resolution. Instead they could have gone for a resolution of 2 394 x 866 = 2 073 204 with only miniscule waste and still fit into the same number of pixels as a regular 1080p disc... Oh well... :/
You know there were Anamorphic LaserDiscs? They're in fact called Squeeze LD. They came out late in the LDs lifespan and none came out commercially in the US.
@@lartrak Well. Yes, I know of Squeeze LD. But that one used 1.33x anamorphic to get a 16:9 frame into a 4:3 signal. For movies like Star Wars they still had to waste pixels (or rather, lines) on black letterboxes. With 2x anamorph they could have used all lines and gotten up to 2.66:1 in width. Slight pillarboxing would be needed for 2.35:1 but still less waste of precious image detail. Of course, there were no cinemascope CRTs as far as I know but for projectors it would have made more sense when the desqueesing could be done optically.
They did not, at least not the American pressings. Perhaps they did that with the last Japanese ones before Pioneer gave up the ghost, but definitely not any of the American pressings. They saved that trick for DVD.
Laserdisc is being presented in widescreen, which is basically the original format that was presented in theaters. On VHS, the film has been modified to fit on older 4:3 televisions during the 80's and 90's.
Here it looks like the Laser Disc was like the "Embryo" of the DVD versus the VHS. The bad thing was its enormous size and how expensive they were, if not, we would have had a catalog in high definition up to the DVD and later the Blu Ray
@@desertcat6719 I meant that in front of VHS it seemed that it had more definition. In this comparison the Laser Disc version looks incredibly better than that of VHS, so I suppose the support would give some improvements in the image with respect to the format that won the "Format War" XD
@@desertcat6719In the US it was, but the Japanese actually had an HD LaserDIsc format. It never made it over here because the market for LaserDiscs in the States never merited them trying to market it here. People were still hung up on the entire lack of recording capability thing. But realistically there was no way the industry was going to allow that here. They had massive shit-fits about time-shifting with VHS and Beta; they would never allow recording capability on a technically superior format.
Comparing between these format actually are pretty pointless. Back then there is only CRT TV, best only at 480i resolution, if these two actually is watched on a CRT TV, with at least S-Video then both actually looks good at CRT. Then with the size of CRT also not as big as HDTV nowadays, there is much less detail to be observed on CRT, even with a very good CRT TV. Then these old CRT TV commonly at least has composite video, and player side may even just with RF output on VHS and Laser Disk machine, which also reduce the output quality greatly. Back then the phosphor of CRT also is not very good, until at much later development to improve CRT image quality. I remember back I never complain the quality of VHS even it is poor, simply because the TV won't look much better with different source. Of course, now everyone can afford at least a Full HD TV, that can easily show these formats flaws. These format only looks good on CRT TV, not today's HDTV. VHS is not DVD quality. DVD do prove to be better simply of the later improvement on CRT TV, then with transition into early HDTV that actually make DVD looks much better on much larger screen, simply prove that DVD actually has much more detail, and show full potential on much larger/more resolution screen. The same stories goes to Bluray Disk 1080p and 4K, simply early stage don't has proper TV to show, so that many people claim more resolution is not needed, and indeed these looks tons better than DVD on much larger premium screen.
LD's don't look too bad on a projection HDTV if you mess around with the picture settings on the TV. However, if you plug in an LD player into a UHD 4K TV, you're going end up giving a eulogy for your Laserdisc player. 😢
Is this to show the difference between VHS and LaserDisc (and if so, why not include Beta and Selevtavision) or between pan and scan and Letterboxing? I think it's the second. They did make a VHS letterbox version (and maybe even a Beta one).
What about making copies of the laser disc with the digital out? How would anyone attempt that and is it possible to make an exact copy say going out of the digital out into a digital input?
Laserdisc is an analogue format the only digital output it ever had was with digital audio, the discs use the pits and lands with PCM to encode the analog video signal
Nope. It was strictly analog. And the beautiful part about LaserDisc was that because of the way it was designed, Macrovision was impossible to implement on it without rendering the disc unplayable. I built quite a library of VHS "rips" of LaserDiscs from Blockbuster and another local place in Chicago that rented them.
IIRC, on higher end players in fact you'll often get better picture quality over composite. The technical reasons have to do with the way comb filters are applied, but my memory is hazy.
@@lartrak I've found S-Video to be mostly useful on lower end hardware. The comb filters on high end players are generally high enough quality to not matter either way. It also depends on what you're running your signal into. The composite comb filter on my capture card is so bad that even when routing a composite signal through my S-Video capable VCR, I get a better signal with S-Video.
Yeah. I think it would only matter at best if the master Laserdisc used S-Video or better. Laserdisc has a high bandwidth signal. Composite is more prone to noise than S-Video. Even if Laserdisc encodes composite only. But then again it is a mystery as to how it was mastered.
It's a composite signal on the disc so it's going to be a composite picture no matter what the player has. If you built a brand new player with an HDMI port the picture itself would still be composite.
Lawrence Blythe McLane Yeah, in a way you are correct, but the higher quality connection would reduce noise that could otherwise be added by the poor quality connection.
Simple question here. Quality easy is laserdisc. But the realism ??? I feel more like it’s a POV on the left. Sure less details. But you use more your imagination. I feel it more with the vhs personally.
I don't know what to say... I grew up with having both VHS tapes and DVDs... I'd say DVD looks better, since DVD is more detailed - miles better! DVD > VHS
Is that VHS a pirate? I've got the original on video - and although I'm not saying it's crystal clear - it doesn't have quite the same 'camrip' / '70s porn' vibe as your version.
VHS was normally released in Pan and Scan Crop, they rarely ever had any widescreen releases, but they did have one for Star Wars in 1991, but I guess he just decided not to use it, but Widescreen Version would look worse than a 4:3 Cropped Version, look at the Bladerunner VHS comparisons to see what I mean
A time when the smallest picture improvement was awesome. Now, the difference between HD and 4K is pretty much uninteresting. Perhaps it's the crappy compression ratios the source is using.
Perhaps the resolution difference between HD and UHD isn’t especially interesting, but I’d say HDR is the most compelling part of the format. Techmoan has an excellent video on this subject which I highly recommend.
Big disagree. Proper 4K HDR transfers absolutely crush their 1080 counterparts. The problem is most people don't have the right equipment or are watching RU-vid comparison videos instead of doing their own research. With a decent 4K HDR tv and properly formatted 4K HDR content, you get pristine content as close to owning a copy of the 35mm as it gets.
I'm not going to argue that the resolution is better on the VHS, but the lighting is better on the VHS than the Laser Disc. This has less to do with VHS/DVD or Laser Disc comparisons, than it has to do with things that studios do to movies when they remaster them. The Laser Disc version clearly has a slight blueish tint over the shot that darkens it slightly. I've seen a lot of older movies (Jurassic Park, Batman 1989) rereleased and remastered on DVD that have been darkened (really badly too) the entire color grade changed, sound effects changed, and the volume changed so that explosions and other loud sounds drown out the music in a movie. It's as if all movie studios have become George Lucas now.
You should've captured the vhs from d-theatre vcr and laserdisc from a ripper since both these qualities are just so bad and you could've got hdmi or svga quality over them in terms of deinterlacing and quality increasing too
You should have compared fullscreen to fullscreen, because fullscreen makes full use of the available resolution. In this case, VHS has 240 lines of resolution and they are all being used for picture. LaserDisc has 420 lines, but only about 246 of them are being used for picture, while the rest are just black bars. Laserdisc's resolution advantage is being negated in this comparison due to being letterboxed. And for the absolute best comparison, not only should they both be fullscreen, but they should also be from the same master. For example, the 1995 "Faces" VHS release has the same masters as the 1993 Definitive Collection and 1995 "Faces" LaserDisc releases.
>The widescreen of LD destroys the full screen of VHS Not in terms of resolution. As I've already said, a letterboxed 2.35:1 LD movie only has about 246 lines of resolution for the picture content, which is practically the same as a fullscreen VHS tape has. It would only beat a fullscreen VHS in terms of chroma (color) resolution, i.e., it would have better color. >The full screen LD would simply annihilate VHS Of course it would. When doing comparisons, they should always be as "apples to apples" as possible, which, in this case means, fullscreen VHS and LD from the same master.
A letterboxed LD does not have "practically the same (resolution) as a fullscreen VHS tape". Both VHS and Laserdisc have 480 lines of vertical "resolution". Otherwise, interlacing wouldn't work. It is the horizontal resolution which differs between analogue formats. But yes, they should both be letterboxed (or fullscreen) and from the same master for a fair comparison.
False. The idea of separate horizontal and vertical resolution doesn't apply to analog video, it only applies to digital video. With analog video there is only TVL (television lines), and VHS absolutely does not have 480 lines, nor even close; it has ~240 lines of luma resolution (~3 Mhz of luma bandwidth) and ~30 lines of chroma resolution (about half a megahertz of chroma bandwidth). The idea that interlacing wouldn't work with VHS's 240 lines is pure nonsense, straight out of left field. It obviously works fine, as anyone who's ever watched a VHS video can attest to. And LaserDisc has ~420 lines, not 480.
Your confidence is admirable. On the note of TVL, NTSC analogue standards call for 525 lines, with about 480 visible on the TV screen. Sync pulses, captions, and macrovision live in the area not visible to television screens. On VHS, yes indeed. There is no analogue NTSC format with less than 525 total lines. Scan lines rule analogue television. You won't have an image without them. All of them. That's why when measuring analogue video resolution, it's measured horizontally, as by design the vertical lines remain the same.
The 1995 Star Wars Trilogy THX Widescreen VHS vs Star Wars THX Laserdisc was very hard to distinguish between the two on a CRT TV back in the day. I am bold enough to say it was a draw. Pluses and minuses between the two formats. LD was on numerous discs and the VHS was one tape.
Because the Laser Disc has been altered with a digital intermediary when it was remastered so it looks darker. The VHS lighting is actually what the movie originally looked like.
The resolution of the Laser Disc is better, but the brightness of the VHS is better. This is actually the True Lighting of the original movie. When they digitally remaster movies now, they darken them with digital color grading and filters. In some movies it's really bad. Recent releases of Jurassic Park are much darker than the originals.
@@seppukusushi2848 Pretty sure is not. If you look at 4K77, a scan of the theatrical prints of A New Hope, comparing it to the VHS copy on this video, it actually is too bright. So yeah, the brightness on the VHS isn't better.
@@pepsiforbread1416 I didn't say VHS was better. This proves you didn't understand what I was talking about. I'm not talking about recording formats. I'm talking about the Digital Intermediaries. These intermediaries are being placed over all remastered older films and on movies that are shot digitally. It's ruining the look of films. You're just used to it because movies look this way now. I know what I'm talking about, I work closely with the industry. EDIT: I just noticed you mentioned 4K77. This is HD scanning. High Definition isn't "better" than film, and HD transfers lose information. It's a photographic fact. Filters are then placed over the shots to "improve" the look along with changes sometimes in the color grading.
@@seppukusushi2848 I was talking about the brightness as VHS was a very bright transfer if you compare it to transfers that don't ruin the color timing like 4K77, the laserdisc on the right or even the Despecialized Edition.
Wrong. The VHS tape is TOO bright. Everything is overexposed. The LaserDisc looks the way the film is supposed to look, within the limitations of that format.
@@AcesHighStudios Wrong. Overexposure is something that happens *in camera* like in old silent films. When movies are digitally remastered these days, they have darkened filters and color grading placed over the shot. I saw Star Wars in the theater and the lighting in the VHS is how it looked. You can have the opinion that the Blueish Tint Filter placed digitally over the shot looks better (I don't agree) but it's not the original look of the movie. A lot of older movies being remastered and released on DVD are being darkened like this and they're being ruined.
@@AcesHighStudios I'm only talking about the lighting, not the resolution or other aspects of image quality. Digitally remastered movies ARE darkening movies this is a FACT. This not a format comparison issue. It's the digital tech making it easier for studios to change lighting and color grading in movies. The lighting here IS Digitally altered.
The laserdiscs literally 566x240i which would be great for deletterboxing the digitalized video footage and the letterboxed vhs is literally 333x142i which would've been great that I wish you would've done if someone has a home theatre with 6k or 8k and a native 5:4 aspect ratio or 7:6 but no, you fucked it up and dekickassed it too so please reupload this and remaster it better since it literally sucks and I hate this stupid comparison
The VHS isn't overexposed. Overexposure is something that happens *in camera* when the movie is filmed like in old silent films. Studios quite often place filters and color grading over movies that are remastered and put on DVD and also on this Laser Disc. It was harder to mess with the lighting and coloring of a movie in the old days when they were put on VHS. The Laser Disc version has a slight Blueish Tint placed over the shot that darkens it slightly.
