Laserdisc rabbit hole, short lived.

I still have three of my four LD players. One I sold off to a friend who wanted it as a spare--it was one of the mid-level players. The Sony was always a piece of crap, and I wonder why I don't just send it to a landfill. But otherwise, I still have two. One is an antique--an LD-660 "DiscoVision" (whose favorite disc was "Saturday Night Fever" for some strange reason), a top-loader which only managed CX noise reduction, no remote, and no chapter stops. It dates back to the early to mid 80s.

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The other is a DVL-700 combo player, which I bought as a store demo and it was quite the workhorse. It had issues with DVDs, but played LDs perfectly. I haven't used it in over a dozen years.

I still have some unobtainium discs, but most were replaced by DVD or BluRay by now. Some of the early LDs look like crap, as they were prior to proper restoration--washed-out colors, terrible contrast, sometimes from film that wasn't in the best shape to begin with. Can't even give those away.
 
I still have three of my four LD players. One I sold off to a friend who wanted it as a spare--it was one of the mid-level players. The Sony was always a piece of crap, and I wonder why I don't just send it to a landfill. But otherwise, I still have two. One is an antique--an LD-660 "DiscoVision" (whose favorite disc was "Saturday Night Fever" for some strange reason), a top-loader which only managed CX noise reduction, no remote, and no chapter stops. It dates back to the early to mid 80s.

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The other is a DVL-700 combo player, which I bought as a store demo and it was quite the workhorse. It had issues with DVDs, but played LDs perfectly. I haven't used it in over a dozen years.

I still have some unobtainium discs, but most were replaced by DVD or BluRay by now. Some of the early LDs look like crap, as they were prior to proper restoration--washed-out colors, terrible contrast, sometimes from film that wasn't in the best shape to begin with. Can't even give those away.

I remember the Star Wars disc (which I have around here somewhere) was so bad you could see the mattes switching as TIE fighters flew by. I actually loved that because it let me see behind the scenes and appreciate just how labor intensive it was to make the movie.
 
I remember the Star Wars disc (which I have around here somewhere) was so bad you could see the mattes switching as TIE fighters flew by. I actually loved that because it let me see behind the scenes and appreciate just how labor intensive it was to make the movie.
Which Star Wars disc was it? I remember joining the Columbia House laserdisc club, and got the trilogy as my three introductory titles--these were the letterboxed originals with the 20th Century Fox logos at the top (which would make those the original cuts, I'm thinking). We later got the "remastered" (and "Lucased") "black box set" version later on when they came, out, which IIRC were released after the theatrical re-release that had some scenes altered or restored.

That LD club was killer, though. It operated differently from the other clubs that CH ran. This one had frequent blowout sales, where you could get a bunch of titles for under $10 each, some of them prime titles, others were titles I'd never seen anywhere else that were desirable. And they even had great deals on newer releases. I don't even remember if they had the selection of the month, as I never remember getting any or having to turn them down via mail-in cards. (Maybe they were doing it online at that point.) I made large additions to the collection through the club.
 
I remember the Star Wars disc (which I have around here somewhere) was so bad you could see the mattes switching as TIE fighters flew by. I actually loved that because it let me see behind the scenes and appreciate just how labor intensive it was to make the movie.
Back in the late '80s there were afternoon reruns of Start Trek on a local indi TV channel where you could seen those.
 
I recall there were pioneer models that had video games built in, or you needed to purchase a separate adapter. Maybe someone here knows more details on these models.
 
Funny, I just had a pal of mine ask if I still had a LD player, as he had a small number of those "CD Video" discs that had one Laserdisc video on them, and a couple of audio tracks. I have all of one here--"New Frontier" by Donald Fagen. Here is what they looked like. The CD audio portion was about the size of a 3" CD single, and the analog Laserdisc video was beyond that on the disc.

http://www.obsoletemedia.org/cd-video/
 
Funny, I just had a pal of mine ask if I still had a LD player, as he had a small number of those "CD Video" discs that had one Laserdisc video on them, and a couple of audio tracks. I have all of one here--"New Frontier" by Donald Fagen. Here is what they looked like. The CD audio portion was about the size of a 3" CD single, and the analog Laserdisc video was beyond that on the disc.

http://www.obsoletemedia.org/cd-video/

Yeah I still have a Stray Cats LD Single. I think it's a 7 inch.
 
Yeah I still have a Stray Cats LD Single. I think it's a 7 inch.
I think that was the 8" LD, single-sided with three or four tracks--I have that one, maybe eight or ten total. One is a double-sided Joe Jackson that had the live sessions from his Big World gig.
 
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