yrly
Breaking records is good?
I have nearly 400 laserdiscs, my girlfriend has another 50 or 60. I got into this format with a $5 RCA LD player (same as Pioneer CLD-M90) from the thrift store about 2 or 3 years ago. The player was used so little the lube for the transport was sticky, so I cleaned it off relubed it and was good to go. I now have 4 LD players, all made by Pioneer, my girlfriend's player is also a Pioneer. I have many rare titles, some out of print on any format, some never transitioned to DVD for whatever reason. Most of the titles were obtained cheaply with a bit of searching involved (I probably paid between $1 and $2 a movie for most of them).
Picture quality has a lot to do with the comb filter in the TV you are using, assuming you're not using the player's internal one if it has an SVHS jack. My Sony 42A10 will do an awesome job of yielding a very good 42 inch picture out of one of them. You'd be surprised at how good it looks. My 27 inch Samsung HD set from a few years ago will yield a picture that often times looks superior to the DVD (you'd really have to see to believe it). In my bedroom on the 32 inch LCD I have to use the SVHS jack from the player as all the jacks on the TV are hooked up to something which yields an OK picture but not the best. If I ever rearrange the setup I'll toy around with hooking it up with a composite because most of the new TVs have pretty good comb filters. My girlfriend's is hooked up to a 27 inch Insignia LCD TV and it does a pretty nice job with them, good filmlike quality especially at that size. Her player is an obscure Pioneer which isn't the best, but probably not the worst either (has a heavy duty chassis stamped with a honeycomb pattern and has very little vibration). Lastly I picked up one of those BOTL Pioneer CLD-S104 players as a backup (due to the size of my collection) and ended up hooking it up to my Sayett Mediashow XC projector. I have to run it into a scaler to convert it to a 640x480 VGA signal that will work with the projector but the resulting picture is pretty decent for a BOTL player, it is easily watchable at the 63 inches I have projected.
Oddly this is one format I was the late adopter of. I had my DVD player when they were selling for about $600 (got it at a going out of business sale for a then cheap $150 and it still works), the DVD rack was a small spinner rack tucked in the back corner of Circuit City at the time. I already have an HD DVD player and about 15 movies.
In all honesty though being an early adopter of DVD and owner of more movies than I could possibly count, if I was purchasing movies right now its going to either be HD DVD or Laserdisc. Once you've actually used one of these HD DVD players on a properly setup display without overdriven colors like the ones they use to test them in the store you'll likely never be able to put up with the artifacts you'll see when watching a DVD. Even my ProScan DVD player which outperforms just about anything I've tried still will looks way worse than the HD DVD. Laserdisc obviously lacks compression artifacts since its not compressed, honestly I prefer the softer look of less resolution to the digital artifacting on the DVD.
Picture quality has a lot to do with the comb filter in the TV you are using, assuming you're not using the player's internal one if it has an SVHS jack. My Sony 42A10 will do an awesome job of yielding a very good 42 inch picture out of one of them. You'd be surprised at how good it looks. My 27 inch Samsung HD set from a few years ago will yield a picture that often times looks superior to the DVD (you'd really have to see to believe it). In my bedroom on the 32 inch LCD I have to use the SVHS jack from the player as all the jacks on the TV are hooked up to something which yields an OK picture but not the best. If I ever rearrange the setup I'll toy around with hooking it up with a composite because most of the new TVs have pretty good comb filters. My girlfriend's is hooked up to a 27 inch Insignia LCD TV and it does a pretty nice job with them, good filmlike quality especially at that size. Her player is an obscure Pioneer which isn't the best, but probably not the worst either (has a heavy duty chassis stamped with a honeycomb pattern and has very little vibration). Lastly I picked up one of those BOTL Pioneer CLD-S104 players as a backup (due to the size of my collection) and ended up hooking it up to my Sayett Mediashow XC projector. I have to run it into a scaler to convert it to a 640x480 VGA signal that will work with the projector but the resulting picture is pretty decent for a BOTL player, it is easily watchable at the 63 inches I have projected.
Oddly this is one format I was the late adopter of. I had my DVD player when they were selling for about $600 (got it at a going out of business sale for a then cheap $150 and it still works), the DVD rack was a small spinner rack tucked in the back corner of Circuit City at the time. I already have an HD DVD player and about 15 movies.
In all honesty though being an early adopter of DVD and owner of more movies than I could possibly count, if I was purchasing movies right now its going to either be HD DVD or Laserdisc. Once you've actually used one of these HD DVD players on a properly setup display without overdriven colors like the ones they use to test them in the store you'll likely never be able to put up with the artifacts you'll see when watching a DVD. Even my ProScan DVD player which outperforms just about anything I've tried still will looks way worse than the HD DVD. Laserdisc obviously lacks compression artifacts since its not compressed, honestly I prefer the softer look of less resolution to the digital artifacting on the DVD.