Star Trek on Laserdisc
*Available in TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and theatrical release flavors.
It’s guaranteed very few Star Trek fans have ever seen these, they are as hard to find as it gets. What we have here is Star Trek on a fully analog video format that isn’t plagued by digital artifacts found on streaming platforms and early DVD releases (such as the DS9/VOY releases), nor does it have any of the quality issues found with VHS tape.
The elephant in the room here is cost, so don’t go searching Ebay/ZenMarket just yet. As with most analog hifi things, you have to spend a lot to get high quality results. Laserdisc is no exception, and it’s even worse because of the rarity of the discs and the equipment all having antique status.
That being said, in my quest to transport myself back to the 1990’s, I have amassed enough equipment and specialty gear to capture Laserdiscs in stupidly high quality, and have uploaded the results for normal people to see. Now the preferred way to watch these is in their native resolution with a high end LD player hooked directly to a retro Trinitron CRT or Plasma TV, but these direct disc captures will be the best possible viewing method on modern display devices.
Voyager LD Sample YT – VOY LD Sample Direct Download
DS9 LD Sample YT – DS9 LD Sample Direct Download
Hardware used for capture:
- Pioneer CLD-D704
- Domesday Duplicator
- Windows PC (i9-10900k/RTX-3080/32GB RAM)
Software used for processing:
- ld-decode
- Hybrid + Vapoursynth
- Premiere Pro
- Audition
- Topaz
Honestly amazing.
Why do they look better than they DVDs?
LaserDisc stores the video signal in an entirely analog format on the disc, similar to a vinyl record but using lasers. In theory, under good conditions, the input signal is almost entirely reproduceable on playback (minus some degradation in the form of noise and dropouts).
The end viewing result should be something very close to the master tape that was used to make the LD discs, which in this case should be the same tapes used to broadcast the show on TV.
DVD uses the same resolution and video format as LD but digitized, so it’s pretty evenly matched and DVD has better numbers on paper, but where it fails is its use of lossy compression (MPEG2) to fit all that data onto a disc which visibly degrades the image quality quite a bit. This issue is compounded because they chose to jam multiple episodes onto a single 4.7gb disc plus various extras and bullshit resulting in even lower video quality.
If only Paramount would get off it’s ass and make a BluRay release…
Thank you for the explanation.
Yes I wish they would remaster DS9 as the documentary proved possible. But Paramount won’t sink any money in to it. I was hoping they would for Paramount+ like what HBO did with some classics for HBO Max. But alas, no
A full HD remaster from the film reels would be amazing, but even just re-digitizing the master tapes would give an improvement. That wouldn’t cost more than a team full of interns and some computers.
Indeed and equally perplexing considering how hot Star Trek is right now. You’d think they’d want it in high quality for the next 20 years of streaming/digital/tv rights etc