My newest obsession: LaserDiscs

I've recently gotten into these in the past week or so. So far I've already acquired 15 movies. 6 of which I bought at a local store, the rest from Ebay. Originally I was wanting to get into VCDs, but they are incredibly uncommon in the USA and almost always need to be imported from Asia, which can get expensive.

What I like about LDs is that they are incredibly cheap here in the USA. I bought the godfather trilogy for under twenty bucks! You can't get it for that price on even VHS sometimes! One of the stores I normally shop at sells all LDs for $1.50 or $2.00, unless its something more unusual or rare.

I look forward to acquiring even more movies on this format... Anybody else into it?

^^
I love collecting LD's. I'm up to almost 50 movies.
Would have loved to have more but the shipping cost is a killer to this part of the world.

WRT the LD players themselves I've got a couple of pretty average ones as far as LD playback quality is concerned.
Those are the Pioneer CLD-V2600, and the LaserActive CLD‑A100.

LD was an awesome format IMO and it's great to have movies and concerts in non-bastardized versions.

pics or it didn't happen

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Originally Posted by JDB

pics or it didn't happen

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I have quite an LD haul on the way. I'll post pics when I get it.

Your next obsession, HD DVD. J/K.

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Originally Posted by DarkDragon

Your next obsession, HD DVD. J/K.

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oh you.

HDDVD is one of the most useless formats i can think of. It's slightly worse than BD and lacks the wonderful artwork of LD.

If only they could make a format using the same technology as BD... but the size of a LaserDisc! Imagine how much data you could fit on there, and it would look so badass! The ultimate in picture quality + collectors appeal and artwork! A man can dream...

HD-DVD is worth it if you can get your hands on a cheap enough external 360 HD-DVD drive (which doubles as a standard USB CD/DVD drive which is pretty useful) and use an app such as MakeMKV to rip them straight to MKV files and play them that way.

meh. Still doesnt seem worth it to me... why not just use BD?


SO not having received my LD player yet, how does LaserDisc quality compare to other obsolete formats of the time? such as Betamax, VHS, SVHS, etc.?

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Originally Posted by AlecRob

SO not having received my LD player yet, how does LaserDisc quality compare to other obsolete formats of the time? such as Betamax, VHS, SVHS, etc.?

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Audio quality is better than all of them, on par with LPCM Stereo on DVDs with a small grain of noise (but it's very slight in most cases) when using analog audio and some later releases use digital stuff like Dolby Digital 2.0 or 5.1 (I don't like those). It depends a lot on the original recordings but for the most part it's great.
Video quality is certainly superior to VHS but I really don't know where I'd place it when compared to Betamax and SVHS. It gets the job done IMO.

Here are some examples to give you an idea:








This is probably using digital audio crap track:




This one sounds really great:



This is bizarre but sounds damn great:



A comparison:



And you can always search (using this fuzzy system) in the LD database to see what you can get in LD and which version/release you actually have (it says when it uses analog audio or not, for an example):
http://www.lddb.com/

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Originally Posted by AlecRob

meh. Still doesnt seem worth it to me... why not just use BD?


SO not having received my LD player yet, how does LaserDisc quality compare to other obsolete formats of the time? such as Betamax, VHS, SVHS, etc.?

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Visual quality is considerably higher than standard VHS and Beta. I'd say probably on par with SVHS.


BTW, My first ever "home theater" experience was with a friend's laser disc collection. You had to be quite wealthy. I recall he used to get movies on VHS and if they were any good he later would get them on LD. We used to watch them on a 16 foot projector screen with 2 dobermans on an elevated couch behind us. They liked popcorn so if you shared you were ok by them! Occasionally one would lay in font of the projector and it was "You move him . . . no, YOU move him!" All in the finest stereo sound of the day!

Laserdiscs are awesome. I don't collect them, but was very tempted when they started going by the wayside and became cheap (in their prime, Laserdiscs were for people with serious money). To this day, it's the only good way to own the original Star Wars trilogy.

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Originally Posted by AlecRob

meh. Still doesnt seem worth it to me... why not just use BD?


SO not having received my LD player yet, how does LaserDisc quality compare to other obsolete formats of the time? such as Betamax, VHS, SVHS, etc.?

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Yeah, HD-DVD was a pretty decent way to get into HD flicks a few years back, when it still had meaningful exclusives on the format and the movies were dirt cheap in comparison to BR, but now that BR movies have gotten relatively cheap themselves, HD-DVD has become a format that doesn't offer any real advantages.

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Originally Posted by AlecRob

meh. Still doesnt seem worth it to me... why not just use BD?


SO not having received my LD player yet, how does LaserDisc quality compare to other obsolete formats of the time? such as Betamax, VHS, SVHS, etc.?

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Oh yeah absolutely, BD is my preferred format. I just managed to pick up an HD-DVD drive for next to nothing so I still get HD-DVDs if I find them cheaply enough.

As for LD, never seen it in person myself but going by HQ uploads I've seen as well as the tech specs, it's the next best thing to DVD, and even in some cases surpasses it as it's obviously uncompressed. Less resolution overall but lack of compression artefacts makes up for that. That being said, DVDs were generally encoded well. Nowadays though the encoding seems to have gone right out the window. Not that I'm worried though because everything should be on BD by now :p

I love LD, I have a nice lil collection of about 44 (I think I have a few others hiding out on me somewhere, I just moved recently and I still haven't gotten everything unpacked yet),but a few of those are laseractive games. I really want that star wars trilogy LD set..For a dude like me that likes weird obscure horror/sci fi fantasy movies of the past LD has an awesome library.

Here's some of my LD's : Split second (w Rutger Hauer), Evil Dead 2 special blood red disc edition,The Resurrected by one of my fav director's Dan O'bannon (I definitly recommend this one for hp lovecraft fans or just horror fans, its nothing special but good cheesy fun), Strange Brew w Rick Moranis, a roger corman edgar allan poe double feature of Masque of the red death w vincent price and premature burial w Ray Milland, assault on precinct 13(the old version obviously),gremlins (love joe dante movies), double feature of The Abominable Dr Phibes and Dr Phibes Rises Again, the street fighter w sonny chiba, Switchblade Sisters, The Last Star Fighter, Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, Dusty Hoffman), Michael Jordan come Fly with Me (Lol), Roman Polanki's Pirates, the killer Elite (another Peckinpah), Good Bad & Ugly, From the Life of Marionettes (ingmar bergman), the Wild Bunch (Peckinpah), Suspiria (Argento), Blades (a decent Troma released movie about a killer lawnmower), Twin peaks, Double feature of Baron Blood and Lisa and The Devil (both Mario Bava), the Getaway (steve mcqueen, Peckinpah), Blue Velvet, Apocalypse Now, a few Three Stooges discs, Indiana Jones last crusade, Cliffhanger (Stalone, also its the best movie ever made), Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Magician (Bergman)..

Ive got a few others but nothing super interesting. I want to pick up some more LD's one of these days.

I created an LD group here on Sega-16: http://www.sega-16.com/forum/group.php?groupid=31

I have lots of LaserDiscs but I wouldn't consider myself a collector. I just sort of find them at thrift shops grouped with the records because the employees don't know any better. I got a lot of "great" Roger Corman films last week. I also have a lot of players since I can find those for like 8 bucks each. For some reason it is a lot more fun to pull out a LaserDisc on movie night, especially when some people who have never heard of them.

^Nice! Corman's the man. Ive got a ton of his work on DVD and a signed copy of his book. I didn't know it was signed when I bought it, the item description made no mention of it. Not that it matters signatures are pretty worthless to me unless their from the president or maybe an astronaut or something

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Originally Posted by AlecRob

oh you.

HDDVD is one of the most useless formats i can think of. It's slightly worse than BD and lacks the wonderful artwork of LD.

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Actually there are cases were HD-DVD looks better:

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1243394/ap...comparison-pix

Good ole LaserDisc's I remember that Tower was the only place that I can remember that actually sold those massive things back in the 90's. The only other fond memory I have of them is when Pandemonium was running those pay to play contests.

So I now own three laserdisc players, all pioneer. A CLD-M301, a CLD-V2800, and a CLD-3030.

Lol, I hope you have plenty of room. Laserdiscs add up fast in the amount of space they take up. I've probably got around 100 LDs including some MegaLDs and LD-roms, but I'm debating clearing out some of them soon since the space they use is massive. I've got almost all the Bond movies that were released on LD, and a lot of anime I've managed to pick up cheap at this point.

Like most have said, LD really shines with the audio. Video can be pretty good too, but it's normally around DVD quality.

I remember I got interested in LaserDiscs when I bought a couple I found mixed in with some records at Goodwill. So I had to go get a player because I wanted to check them out. I got one cheap on ebay, $20 shipped as is and it worked! But after watching a movie it reminded me why I don't like listening to records anymore. I hate how you have to flip the disc over and how it doesn't stop when it reaches the end of a side. I fell asleep on side 3 of Mission Impossible and when I woke up it was replaying a scene I saw before I fell asleep. So I guess it just kept playing that disc over and over for hours.

I havent seen this yet but I think its out.

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Originally Posted by AlecRob

oh you.

HDDVD is one of the most useless formats i can think of. It's slightly worse than BD and lacks the wonderful artwork of LD.

If only they could make a format using the same technology as BD... but the size of a LaserDisc! Imagine how much data you could fit on there, and it would look so badass! The ultimate in picture quality + collectors appeal and artwork! A man can dream...

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You will need to rip them a to more common file format (avi, mp4, wmv, etc.) on your computer hard drive to play them smoothly on media player.

http://www.appgeeker.com/convert/rip...o-avi-mac.html