How to play correctly PAL & NTSC laerdiscs on HDTV ?

[david winter]

Hi,

I have a collection of laserdiscs in both NTSC / PAL formats I would like to play, especially classical music and opera LDs.
I just brought a Panasonic LX-K770 autoreverse laserdisc player which seems to work fine, but:
- NTSC LDs will play with slightly noisy and somewhat saturated video on my PAL curved HDTV (Samsung).
- PAL LDs will not play. I guess the player is NTSC only ? One PAL LD almost played but video was terrible and sound very distorded.

I have another boxed Panasonic LD player somewhere which I believe to be PAL, but I didn't bring it back for testing yet.
Right now, the video is taken from the red/white/yellow RCA outputs using a video cable (the video is almost twich thicker than the audio so I guess the cable is ok). But my TV will only take a mini jack input for AV (old video) and I'm not sure if this won't alter the video quality due to internal capacitance of the jack plug.

What I would ike to know is:
- Whether there is a recommended multiformat (NTSC & PAL) and autoreverse laserdisc player known to be reliable. I restore audio gear so if there is any non-complicated restoration job to do I'm sure I can do it.
- What is recommended to give the best quality picture on modern HDTV flat screens. For example, some HDMI adaptor taking old video formats like LD / VHS ?

Thanks.