Pioneer pitches LD as "60% sharper" than VHS. LD image quality is roughly comparable to standard 16mm film, VHS is roughly comparable to 8mm film. There are no home video formats comparable to 35mm or 70mm film. The pulse-FM data structure on an LD (unlike ordinary VHS/Beta), is defined to hold all the information present in the composite video signal. Depending on source material and the transfer to disc, LD is above live TV broadcast quality: For NTSC, this is 425 TVL (luminance lines horizontally for 3/4 of the screen width) and about 482 scan lines, compared to 330x482 for broadcast. For PAL, the numbers are 450x560 and 400x560, respectively. Compare this to 240x482 for good VHS (recorded, pre-recorded is probably less). Only recently have Super-VHS approached LD capability, and ED-Beta has gone even further with its resolution of 525x482. Of course, pre-recorded material is not widely available in these VCR formats. Even using S-VHS/ED-Beta to tape off-air still only reaches the 330x482 of the broadcast signal (400x560 in PAL countries).
Also:
NTSC discs: * 2 analog channels (last discs like this were made in the 80's) * 2 analog channels + 2 uncompressed digital channels * 1 analog channel + 2 uncompressed digital channels + 5.1 Dolby Digital channels * 2 analog channels + 5.1 DTS channels PAL discs: * 2 analog channels (last discs like this were made in the 80's) * 2 uncompressed digital channels
Complete FAQ here
Thanks... but what sold me on the LD format was that it offered letterboxing and digital sound.