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Laser discs are not good?

9

91firebird

Super Member
Well have 300 laser discs and 6 players have been in the stash for many years.well dug them out hooked them up and now know
Why they been in storage for many years.the picture is soft and grainy the sound sucks.well cannot compare to DVDs blueray
Movies.can see why they were in the stash and they going right back into the stash.the only thing is the covers are nice colorful.well
Hell have 30 disks that were never opened plus alot of box sets.well anyway if I run across any dirt cheap will still buy them what
A bad habit to have!
 
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From a time when a 31" screen was considered large. They were a step up in quality from Videotape, but still pale in comparison to DVDs. They just don't look that great on a modern large flat screen, the resolution just wasn't there. If you have a home theater receiver that can upscale the video, that may help a little.

I have about 60 laserdiscs. I've been going through them to check which are not available on DVD. Those would be the few with any value and worth hanging on to. Example - The Beatles, Let it Be, only released on Laserdisc & VHS and can sell for $100 or more.

You can look up music video type Laserdiscs on discogs and check values, usually somewhere between $5 and $15 each.

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I still have a player and maybe 100 discs. Using the S-video connection, the smoothness of motion compared to a regular DVD looks more natural on the LaserDisc, but yes ...it certainly doesn't scale up to 75" or larger screen. We bought the player back when our television was a HUGE 35" Sony CRT; at the time, the sound and picture were miraculous.
 
91firebird said:
...the picture is soft and grainy the sound sucks.well cannot compare to DVDs blueray
Movies.can see why they were in the stash and they going right back into the stash.the only thing is the covers are nice colorful.well
Hell have 30 disks that were never opened plus alot of box sets.well anyway if I run across any dirt cheap will still buy them what
A bad habit to have!
Click to expand...

If they suck why would you keep them, let alone buy more?
 
LaserDiscs stored dynamic analog video signals using FM modulation.
First introduced in 1978.
Over the years they may show oxidation (laser rot).
I donated my dad's 40+ LDs, 100s of VHS and DVDs and the TV.
 
It's an analog composite format, of course DVD is going to look better, and Blu ray will blow it away. As mentioned, it looked better than its contemporaneous formats, and the addition of AC3 was the first consumer source of true multichannel surround sound (since Pro-Logic was a matrixed surround, with the surround and center extracted from L/R). View it for what it was, and don't get nostalgic about past formats.
 
LaserDisc was the best version of analogue TV you could get. Doesn’t mean that you’re not going to look at it compared to DVD, HD, and UHD and wonder how on earth we put up with that quality for so long. The answer: it was all we could get! I remember seeing a demo of HD at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in 1995 - an HD LaserDisc of a sumo match - and thinking it was miraculous.

That said: sentimentality and uncompressed 2 channel digital soundtracks on the 2001, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Jurassic Park, and Army of Darkness discs will keep me owning the smallish collection I have.

I’m always impressed with DVD, depending on the original source. DVDs from film are very watchable even if they’re not as clear as HD. Video sourced DVDs are slightly less successful and show the same limitations that LaserDisc has, largely because the best analog tape formats performed about as well if not slightly better than LaserDisc.
 
Well,spoke to soon.I was using a composit to hdmi adapter.so I took it out,ran composit audio video cables to my
Pioneer 385 reciever.a composit Cable from the reciever to a samsung 1080p tv.put on some laserdiscs on,dam
They look much better,not blueray quality but very watchable.so it was the adapter that was the problem.the laser
Disc player is a marantz.next I will try a pioneer 704 player.well anyway the adapter was causing the bad picture.
 
Well found my other rca to hdmi converter,well works good but I did have the other one set to 720 not 1080.well anyway the picture is and sound are better very watchable,well on to my next insanity,wonder what the hell that
Will be,maybe get the Betamax out ?
 
They work good for target practice at the range.

I had two big crates of them that I dragged around with me as I moved around for work that I couldn't give away so I finally decided to just put them out at the curb with the trash. Thousands of dollar up in smoke. Actually I wish I could have exchanged them for some smoke.

I kept a few rock oriented ones because of the covers. Thought maybe I'd frame them someday but they are extremely expendable as far as I'm concerned.
 
I'm not sure why anyone would expect a format that dates back to 1978, even older than the Compact Disc, to compete with any modern format. But it still has it's merits.

There are a few noteworthy things about Laserdisc.

The video is actually a composite signal. With that in mind, even if your player has an S-Video output, it's often better to simply use the Composite output. Using the S-Video output just means it's using the built-in Composite to S-Video converter, and modern electronics generally do a better job of working with the raw Composite signal than whatever old electronics are in your players built-in S-Video converter.

The video signal is actually analog. That means the quality of the player has a noteworthy impact on the quality of the resulting video. Not all Laserdisc players are equal.

Early Laserdiscs used Analog Audio. PCM digital audio was added later, and the Analog tracks were repurposed, with one often being used as a commentary track, and the other being used to store a modulated AC3 (Dolby Digital) signal. You need an "AC3 Demodulator" to convert the analog AC3 signal to a usable Digital AC3 signal. These are rare, so in most cases the PCM track is your best bet. A small number of rare discs replaced the PCM track with a DTS track. This does not require a demodulator. The PCM track is typically encoded with a matrixed Dolby Surround track which works quite well with receivers that offer Dolby Pro-Logic (and later variants) decoding.

The video resolution of Laserdisc is 420i, lower than later DVDs that maxed out at 480P, but still very watchable especially with a good player and some post-processing.

My main Laserdisc player is a Panasonic LX-1000U. It's a very decent player and a tank that has stood the test of time. I run it's output into the input of my HTPC which gives me lots of options for deinterlacing and upscaling. I have two different sets of the original unmodified Star Wars trilogy on Laserdisc and that is the main reason that the Laserdisc player gets used these days, but I also play other movies occasionally just for nostalgia sake. Probably my "best", and also newest Laserdisc is a copy of Star Wars: Phantom Menace, which was only released in Japan (Laserdisc was more popular in Japan and had a longer life there). It has hardcoded Japanese subtitles, but they are in the black bars, so I can just crop them out.
 
Chris Brown said:
I have two different sets of the original unmodified Star Wars trilogy on Laserdisc and that is the main reason that the Laserdisc player gets used these days, but I also play other movies occasionally just for nostalgia sake.
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I've got the CLV Star Wars trilogy THX discs and the first Special Edition box set for historical reasons since they've messed with even the special edition versions on blu-ray and streaming. Also: Criterion's Ghostbusters and CLV Akira edition are another couple of discs I won't part with.
 
Laserdiscs are great for their era, but they don't compare with later stuff. I have one and use it, looks perfectly fine on a 55" if you want to watch a movie. Its lacking if the goal is to look at every detail and compare it to later higher resolution formats.

There is a collector market for them, a few of us are interested, most people have no idea what they are.

CAV is the way to go if you can get it, freeze-frame features and slightly better picture quality. Down side is you get about 25 minutes per side. I recently watched Jurassic Park on CAV. 5 sides / 3 discs.
 
have to be in the right market, ebay is probably it, and there are a ton that nobody is going to buy at any price. I wouldn't be half surprised if a fair number of people who own Star Wars on Laserdisc can't even watch it. They will pay 100 bucks for the collector edition set though. I would like a copy to watch, but I refuse to pay collector money for it.
 
I've never used Laserdisc (so I am NOT an expert, to say the least), but I think in addition to the low resolution (relative to today), the fact that it was an analog signal makes it look far worse on today's hi-def digital TV's. The pixels output from laserdisc are not one-for-one, or an even multiple, of today's hi-def TV resolutions, so that makes it look softer and blurrier than it would look on an analog TV. For example, a 480 line laserdisc output needs to be stretched 4.5 times on a 2160-line 4K TV display. The fact that it isn't an even multiple means that the TV must interpolate the pixels, rather than just stretch them, to try to recreate the picture -- so that interpolation makes it look far worse on a modern TV than what the Laserdisc was capable of on an analog TV. If the ratio was exactly 4, instead of 4.5, it would probably display much better with far less softening and blurring of the image on modern TVs.

A dedicated scaler would probably help it look better on a modern TV, but they are fairly pricy and it would still be low resolution, so you'd have to have a nestalgic passion for laserdisc to make that worth the investment I would think.
 
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I got into laserdisc in the mid 80's. Found a store that rented the discs along with early Pioneer ld players (LD700). The tv was a 45" rear projection. Looked really good compared to Beta in those days. In the early 90's, I got certified with ISF ( sideline gig) and was able to attend several different CES shows along with Stereophile shows in L.A. It was at the Stereophile shows that showcased high end crt front projection (Vidikron) along with line doublers and quadrouplers and the source was laser disc. The images were jaw dropping at that time.

I did not collect many discs, was content to rent. My last best ld player was a CLD-95. Eventually got a decent plasma display and the ld didn't seem to look as good as it once did. LD took a back seat when DVD and BD took it's place and eventually sold off the player and the discs and never looked back.
 
I've held onto a few that were never (yet) reissued in DVD or Blu-ray, and some that were just exceptionally well done special editions. There's also the fact that some LD's are configured in such a way that the soundtrack music can be extracted in HQ audio, assuming dialog and other sound wasn't mixed into the same channels.

Now, there are probably not many like that, but I did manage to "pull out" some never otherwise issued soundtrack cues from a few movies back in the day. Those have persisted as WAV files on my computer(s) ever since.

I still think laserdiscs are pretty remarkable for a format introduced in 1978. No, they can't home a candle to modern hi def formats, but on a 36" or smaller screen, they still provide acceptable quality. The biggest problem now is ever more pervasive disc rot, and managing to keep a high quality working player to actually use them.
 
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