[WillPS]

I thought the Laserdiscs were NTSC, and the lousy image was due to a crap on-the-fly NTSC->PAL conversion on the output? Do these videos disprove that?

It's much easier to do a decent standards conversion job if you don't need to do it in realtime, so even for PAL videos converted to NTSC laserdisc you'd expect the image at that point to be reasonable (when viewed on NTSC compliant equipment!).