LaserDisc

[obeygiant]

When I was a kid I must have watched Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars, Raiders of the lost ark, Romancing the Stone, Wargames and a few others so many times that now when I see them, I still get a little "tick" when the time comes to flip the disc.

 

[Erendiox]

Until I viewed this thread, I had no idea such a thing ever existed...

Talk about huge. 😱

 

[Antares]

I remember wanting my family to get a LD player and movies when I was a kid. I had seen them in a store and thought they were really cool. But my family kept telling me it was too expensive. Hmm...maybe I should try and get a few LD's and a player, now. I t would satisfy an old childhood wish....

Talk about huge. 😱

And god no that thing is huuuuge! I've never seen one in person then.

That's what she said.

 

[mstrze]

I remember wanting my family to get a LD player and movies when I was a kid. I had seen them in a store and thought they were really cool. But my family kept telling me it was too expensive. Hmm...maybe I should try and get a few LD's and a player, now. I t would satisfy an old childhood wish....

I'd sell you mine.

 

[quantum003]

A laserdisc (left) is the unholy bastard child of a record and a CD (right). 😀 You have heard of records aka LPs though right young buck? Because if not I'm so old that I really just need to go kill myself. 😱

So the first laserdisc player that I bought does not work, the disc tray doesn't open and close reliably and the laser does not recognize discs. Apparently this is common... (and on Craigslist this sort of thing is VERY common... 😡) But I found a different one in the Goodwill store for $15 today so I'm eager to get home and try it out instead...

 

[GreatDrok]

When DVD came out, many people decided to dump their LD collection but I decided that the difference in quality wasn't worth going through the pain of replacing my discs - besides which there were plenty of movies on LD not available on DVD for a good long time such as Star Wars which took years to come out.

I still have my Pioneer DVL-919E which is a LD/DVD combi player and automatically flips LDs, has a digital field buffer so can do CAV style effects on CLV discs and is also PAL/NTSC compatible which was a big deal at the time because many films were only available as imports from the US when I was living in the UK. The arrival of multistandard players really opened up the LD market outside the US. About 80% of my collection is NTSC. The player was the last model made and I had it chipped so it is also region free for DVD so for a good long time it did a great job of playing every disc I threw at it. Compatible formats are CD, Video-CD, CD-Video (LaserDisc video recorded on a CD sized disc, I have three examples), LaserVision/LaserDisc with analogue or digital audio, some LaserDiscs with Dolby Digital AC3 5.1 surround and others with DTS, as well as DVDs with DTS or AC3 audio. I have about 200 LDs and some 1000 DVDs. I also have examples of other formats such as the mentioned CD-videos, VideoCDs (MPEG1 on a CD) and later formats such as the sadly missed HD DVD and the inferior region locked Blu ray.

I've had a variety of projection systems and LD stood up well for its time. I remember playing Jurassic Park on a 150" Barco and it was way better than VHS while at home I'm on my third InFocus DLP projector - the current one being a 720p In76 which I picked up four years back now. LD needs a bit of help in the noise department for a large screen (mine is 100" 16:9 ceiling mounted) so I drive the projector with the analogue S-Video input and have a bit of noise reduction on to tame the chroma noise but overall LD still doesn't look terrible. For DVDs these days I use a Panasonic Blu ray player which is region free for DVD while being stuck at region B for Blu ray which is probably why I haven't bought as many BDs as I might have done. I also have an HD DVD drive attached to my Xbox 360.

I try to make sure all my formats are playable through my LCD TV and projector so currently I have TiVo, SVHS, LD, DVD, HD DVD, Blu ray and AppleTV.

Yes, I'm a bit of a collector and I do have a soft spot for LD since it was the first properly good quality home video format which was better than broadcast TV and also the first format you could buy films on in their original aspect ratio, with DTS and AC-3 surround. Happy days.

 

[Jaro65]

Yes, I'm a bit of a collector....

You are vastly understating the reality, sir. 🙂

 

[xraydoc]

I've still got a good 40-50 movies on laserdisc - nearly all ultaexpensive widescreen remasters, Criterion Collection discs, etc., though I haven't had a player hooked up in years!

I remember when DVD came out; I was such a "purist" that I was concerned that the compressed digital nature of the DVD would be far inferior to the uncompressed analog nature of the LD.

We know how that one worked out.

 

[Simgar988]

My school's library has Surf Ninjas to check out on laserdisc. In my opinion laserdisc is the best format to watch that movie in. Why? Because it's freaking Surf Ninjas.

P-Worm

Surf ninjaS! What a ****ing movie! With the video game! Man. Classic.

 

[fr4c]

I used to have quite a few laying around, now I can only find copies of Cliffhanger and The Bodyguard...

 

[GreatDrok]

I've still got a good 40-50 movies on laserdisc - nearly all ultaexpensive widescreen remasters, Criterion Collection discs, etc., though I haven't had a player hooked up in years!

I remember when DVD came out; I was such a "purist" that I was concerned that the compressed digital nature of the DVD would be far inferior to the uncompressed analog nature of the LD.

We know how that one worked out.

It was interesting when the first DVDs appeared to see how they really weren't a great improvement over the best LaserDisc had to offer. The THX mastered Star Wars showed what the format was capable of compared with the usual run of the mill transfer. Early DVDs suffered from compression artefacts and often didn't look better than their LD counterparts. It took a couple of years really for DVD mastering to get really good, especially once you started to see direct digital anamorphic transfers. Early DVDs were often double sided, or single layer which really harmed the picture quality since you were limited to about 4Mbps for MPEG2 which sounds OK but really isn't.

Interesting how things have moved on though. The earliest MPEG1 VCDs were absolutely dreadful with 320x240 resolution and I remember a Phillips rep telling me they were much better than LaserDisc (which was full NTSC/PAL resolution) just because they were digital and while he was saying this there was a sequence from Top Gun playing which was just *FULL* of blocks so I had to laugh.

DVD early on was about the same or slightly better than LD depending on the transfer but eventually it surpassed the older format. Now though, you can get DVD quality into the same bitrate as a VCD (H.264 at 1.5Mbps is pretty decent) and a very passable 720p encode at 5Mpbs will fit a full two hour movie on a single layer DVD.

A lot of the reason HD DVD and Blu ray improve over DVD is the switch in codecs and I remember seeing the early Blu rays which were MPEG2 and looked barely better than a superbit DVD whereas HD DVD which always used two layers and VC-1 encoding looked far superior as well as not having the stupid region coding but we know how that turned out too sadly.

 

[SactoGuy18]

Laserdiscs were very good in their time but what finally killed them was the arrival of 480-line progressive scan DVD players with component video connections just after 2000, which finally offered video quality better than Laserdisc.

 

[CaptMurdock]

Oh, Lordy. If you value your discretionary time, you will not get into a discussion with my video guru Steve regarding The Superiority of the Laserdisc Format over DVD. Believe me, he will give you chapter and verse on such esoteric subjects as "black bloom." Run, now.

Just to give you more insight: he also is a big proponent of Betamax over VHS and was into letterbox long before it became fashionable. It got to the point that, whenever he would suggest watching something of his, I would ask "Do you have the pan-and-scan version?" just to get his goat. 😀

 

[mstrze]

Laserdiscs were very good in their time but what finally killed them was the arrival of 480-line progressive scan DVD players with component video connections just after 2000, which finally offered video quality better than Laserdisc.

Interesting theory....since the last major Laserdisc releases were in 2000. ('Sleepy Hollow' and 'Bringing Out The Dead' being the ones listed on Wiki.)

What killed them is they were only in 2% of US homes at their peak in the late 90s (Japan was better at 10%). A format need wide penetration to succeed.

 

[Jaro65]

I've still got a good 40-50 movies on laserdisc - nearly all ultaexpensive widescreen remasters, Criterion Collection discs, etc., though I haven't had a player hooked up in years!

I remember when DVD came out; I was such a "purist" that I was concerned that the compressed digital nature of the DVD would be far inferior to the uncompressed analog nature of the LD.

We know how that one worked out.

Too bad that isn't the case with the sound, right? 😉

 

[Heilage]

My parents still have their LaserDisc-player. We are one of the few people in Norway who bought one (it flopped, too close to the DVD). Our collection is quite nice, it includes:

- Some good old James Bond (Sean Connery primarily)
- The Complete Tex Avery collection
- The Complete Tom&Jerry collectoin
- The Blues Brothers (this one is pure epic in this format)
- Pink Floyd - Pulse

To mention a few. I'm thinking about stealing the player when they move to a new house in a couple of months. 🙂

 

[japasneezemonk]

I remember walking by the Laser Disc display in the basement of Marshall Fields in Downtown Chicago when I was maybe 7 or 8. Then I didn't see one again until I was in High School. By then, almost everyone I knew had DVD players. This thread brought back that somewhat useless memory.