I’ve been into laserdisc for a few years, up over 100 odd discs now. Player is a Pioneer DVL-909. Some of the discs look amazing. I upscale them through a Marantz SR6014 receiver. More than once friends have been fooled into thinking they were watching a blu ray. I’ve got a pressing of War Of The Worlds that leaps off the screen at you. Brilliant
I have over 100 disks. Many very rare. Have the entire Disney classic films. The ones before cancel culture and the woke crowd had them all censored. Have many classics and concerts. Both 8" and 12" disks.
@@12voltvids I just cherry pick stuff now. I’m in Sydney, there’s a pretty good market down here for people selling LD’s, not as many as over there no doubt. I haven’t bought a CD video disc in a while tho….last batch I bought, 4 out of 5 discs were unwatchable. But to prove I’m a total idiot, I’ve been playing with CEDs of late 😂
Your in Sydney and collecting CEDs? Wow, they aren't exactly light shipping. I know the UK got PAL CEDs, but I don't think Australia got CEDs. Or did they? Otherwise everything is overseas shipping for you. I got a ton of CEDs, a local pickup last year doubled the amount I had in one day. I've been collecting VHDs of late, of course that's all overseas shipping from Japan mostly. eBay seller in U.S. with VHD always seem to hike the price up way too far. Even with cheap shipping in U.S. its often not worth it. So I just wait for cheap options from Japan, then group ship it all at once if the timing lines up.
About the CD Video: Techmoan did a video about it, because of the special reflective coating used, they suffered severely from laser rot and the first to go out for good was the audio, than came the noisy picture.
Excellent, Dave. Having never gotten into Laserdisk, I didn’t realize that the information on these disks was so visible to the naked eye. It certainly isn’t on CDs or DVDs. Great, eye-opening video. Thanks for taking the time to record and share👍
There are some DVD's where you can visibly make out sectors and that is DVD-RAM. Though it is CLV it has clearly visible sectors as it was intended to use as a live harddisk. It tried it to use like that but sloooow. I now used it to just archive stuff. Cd's are basically CLV only, plus they don't have the same synch portions a laserdisc needs for video, audiocd's are digital audio. Though you can see tiny circles where there is some seconds of silence between songs, so you can make out the chapters and where the recording ends if the disc is not full. A cdvideo is a hybrid between audio cd and video and you can clearly see the transition there between the two where the audio portion stops and the video porrtion starts.
I had a pioneer that I dug out of an elementary school dumpster in 03. The tray had been broken but was thrown out with player..... At that time I had plenty of time to puzzle piece it back together and clean what look like soda off the boards. It worked for about a year and I watch all kinds of stuff from the thrift store and pawn shops. Even loaned it to a friend's grandpa so he could record lonesome dove series in a computer.
LD AC-3 Dolby Digital & DTS soundtracks still blows me away in 2022! And am comparing it to Dolby Atmos! Won’t be getting rid of my Laser Disc Setup any time soon! 👍
I have too many disks. Got them from a neighbour. Their son was an animator for Pixar and got the cancer from sitting in front of silicon graphics x-ray machines 18 hours a day. He had a big collection and a Yamaha player. His parents gave it all to me when he died. I would have really like the Wurlitzer juke box they have though.
Do not use Brasso. It makes things worse. I tried on a scratched CD. What I found works is wet sanding with 1000+ grit for the deep grooves, then automotive buffing and polishing compound. I tried by hand, but you really need a polishing pad on a electric tool. I'd try it out on a crap CD first :)
Had a Pioneer 1750 here in UK for both PAL/NTSC playback. Loved it and thinking of getting another. Only thing the format struggled with was deep reds. Great vid man, amazed it fired up after all these years 👍
Like other videocomposite formats, red and blue colors have poor resolution resulting in blurred images and color bleeding into other objects in the frame. Luminance always have the highest bandwidth, while chroma and saturation has very poor bandwidth; as such videocomposite formats seem sharper with B/W films !
Few years ago I looked up the block diagram of a Laserdisc player, and find out while the signal on the disc is composite video, but it's a modified composite video. The player separates the Y and C signals, and processes them individually, then merges them at the output to produce a standard composite signal. So this thing probably gives better picture with its S-Video output, because it skips the merging of the processed Y and C signals, and separating them again in the TV or capture card.
That really depends on the player. Later models will base their composite from the Y/C separated signal but earlier models will take composite direct to the composite output. So it depends on the quality of the Y/C Separator in the player vs the Comb Filter on a TV that determines what signal looks the best. In most cases the composite will be better but you just have to try both options to see what looks more pleasing to you.
The s-video output from my Pioneer DVL-700 produces a sharper picture than the composite output. Small texts/titles are sharper with the s-video output.
Got an old what was at the time Top of the Line PIoneer LD-S9. Still use it form time to time to archive LD's to DVD for the occasional LD that's not available on any digital format like DVD or Blu Ray
I started my laserdisc journey only 3 years ago. Picked up a new in box Sony MDP-MR1 with 30 big name titles very cheap and it works great. Only issue the player had was the discs would stick to the top clamp. The glue that held the magnet had leaked slightly. I cleaned it and all good :) My player will play both sides without removing the disc.
I recall being sent out to install one at the Baseball Hall O Fame in Cooperstown. The display ran continuously for tourists so were perfect in that application.
in the mid 90s, someone gave me a Panasonic from the late 80s, and two milk crates full of discs. It plays but the video on screen is a little mixed up. Ive never taken it apart to investigate. Then in the early 2000s someone gave me a Pioneer player from the 90s and more discs. I was told it had low hours and worked but Ive never tried it. I always loved Lazerdisks, a big step above VHS IMO. Along with the Pioneer unit they had a Dragon's Lair arcade game disk. Supposedly you can play the game using the remote control, which i do have. One day i'll have to break it out and stroll down memory lane. Thanks for sharing Dave!
for me i own 9 laserdisc players and tons of movies on the format. i even have the beatles anthology 8 volume set on laserdisc and even the documentary of the beatles called the complete beatles. love the format. also i have a holly grail of laserdisc players the last model ever made by pioneer but an early revision of the model. its a pioneer dvl-919 a dvd laserdisc player that fully works no problems. i myself i prefer the auto flip units. i own 5 auto flip units one being a karaoke unit. anymore if a movie released on it this is the only way i want the movie on laserdisc. i do have a few concerts on laserdisc as well some that might be rare and some that might not be. but as i said i love the format.
If you can find any of the higher end Japan only players at a sensible price, treat yourself, the HLD-X9 is a superb well engineered player capable of showing the format at it's best, some of the japanese pressing also have superior transfers, you just have to put up wth the subtitles. After all these years the format is still highly collectable.
The ability to get multiple audio channels, like remove dialogue from some films, is still unique. I owned several, they all broke and never worked consistently, but I loved them still.
@@eDoc2020 But on some settings on some audio types in LD you had the option of ducking the dialog and listening to the background music, which was cool for some of the classic Disney things, you could hear incidental music. I haven't seen a DVD or Blu Ray player that offers this specific thing.
@@widescreennavel I don't think LD has any specific provision for disabling dialog. Likewise DVD's audio channels can be used for anything so there's no reason they couldn't master DVDs with one track missing dialog. If it's a setting built into the player itself, my guess is it just disables the center channel. Assuming the player only decodes the stereo audio tracks this would mean only keeping the difference between the two channels and cancelling the common signals.
@@eDoc2020 It had two types of audio and two types of discs. I had them, and the discs themselves told you what types of things were offered audio wise. You can trust me. It's real. Check out this link, it might help you out: ua-cam.com/video/UB1q5VgN9YY/v-deo.html
what a lot of people dont realize at least of this current generation is that the digital surround sound platform for home theater was built off Laserdiscs and not DVD. It played a huge part in the evolution of digital sound for Home theater. Lucasfilms use that format as the base for their THX program that set the standard for home theater in the late 80,s through the 90,s. They had their own remastering program to get the picture and sound quality from the discs and units that played the. Pioneer also invested a lot of money and time into the format.
With many hundreds of discs and over 10 players you could call me a Laserdisc fan. I was late in starting to collecting laserdiscs in about 1994, by 2000 it was sadly brought to an end. Most of my collection have been bought in recent years now that the prices have dropped to sensible levels. Laserdisc is the only way to watch uncut and original films, the cartoon discs are highly collectable as as the disney box sets and Star Wars. As for the players, here in the UK we only had flimsy mid range models, i had to import most of my players from the USA and Japan, the Japan only models are by far the best, but were not cheap, my HLD-X9 cost about £1500 approx $1950, i had it serviced by Pioneer in Japan before shipping. The HLD-X9 can even play some of the rotted discs the other player won't, i didn't bother with a muse decoder the price of the discs are still way too high. Sadly the format was ousted by DVD, which at the start was inferior, and the audio from laserdisc is still far better than DVD's compressed sound quality. DTS laserdiscs can even give Blu-Ray a run for it's money, the format was just too expensive for playback only. Recordable laserdiscs were made but only for industrial use. If you can find a good working player and a collection of discs buy it, the format paved the way for all the features that are now on DVD and Blu-Ray.
What an amazing piece of old technology...and this was released at the same time video tape was out, yet it did not gain market popularity over the VCR...Maybe because it was too "new" at the time and expensive to produce, thus consumer went for the cheaper option.
It's because they didn't record. If a recordable disc format had emerged at the same time as VHS there would not have been a VHS. Back then however most people were watching TV on their "19" Hitachi" so they couldn't see the difference anyway. Back then I was watching my VCR on my 13" all tube AGS. Wish i had hung onto that set.
Dave I sold the pioneer model back in 81, we played alien and superman in the store all day. very expensive for 1981 i think it was $1,200 with one movie.
Nice video, I was using them form day one, still have about 250 discs, have a couple of players still working a Pioneer and a Marantz. And yes I found the first batches of DVD that comes out the LD copy was better, but the encoding on the DVD got better very quickly and I found better than LD, have a lot of music LD's
When referring to "well built" electronics, people always points to Sony, but actually Panasonic is very reliable. Things from 70's and 80's most likely still work fine, some even with their original belts ! Panasonic used matsushita components which were (and still are) high quality. It's rare for a panasonic device to require recapping (with the exception of sub-assembly they bought entirely from third party, like Philips CD mechanism)
The music (and sound) on that Sony Promotional LD is CX encoded, I'd assume, based on the feature of the logo on the labels. Just saying, for those who didn't know.
I have a Sony MDP 850d player, and about 40 discs. I found it to have a grainy image...but it was (at the time) connected to my monitor by an av switch, into my Sony Lbt 905, then to composite to VGA conversation. I'm getting a plasma TV soon, to test it on that.
I saw a video where someone cut vinyl grooves into a laserdisc, then tried to play it, the result was surprising: the audio was gone, but the picture was still fully there! 😨
Ya I was in to Laserdisc for since the 90 s but I got my Laserdisc player was a Genexxa and it’s was Kareoke one and I had 1disc We went through a fire some one picked up it and I lost it so,last year I had a great friend that had a great Pioneer Laserdisc player some i traded my turntable for its then a month after that I got some Laserdisc movies i have 70 now i love it
I have a few hundred including star wars, return of the Jedi, empire strikes back. Beatles help, hard days night and yellow submarine. All the original Disney classics, godfather 1 2 and 3. A bunch of concerts. I haven't even watch most of them.
Only one store in my area ever had laserdiscs for renting. Hollywood video did but they only had a shelf of 10 of them. I dont know if they ever went out either.
To watch LDs the way they played in their era it would be best to use an analog TV. I use my old players in a new setup with a modern TV, too many digital artifacts.
Great video. I amassed a collection of over 1200 laserdiscs, and at one point owned 4 players of varying quality. The discs are in great shape, but they start to skip and stop playing at around the 13 min mark of each film on my higher end player. Guessing the bands have to be replaced? Is there any place I can get my Pioneer LD player repaired? I live in Chicago.
Thanks. Could you please also make a video about 8mm projectors and how you can repair sound part of perjecors because mostly perjecors are 50 years old and they defected sound part. Again thanks for your videos and you thought us so many things. I'm your long time fan from begging of your videos on you tube. I wish I'll see you one day 🌹🌹🌹🌹❤️❤️❤️🙏🙏🙏👌👍
I knew it was the best the NTSC system could offer in 1998 when I bought my first and only player. The transfers were junk on many disks. Magavision disks were junk. I also bought it for widescreen Star Wars.
the laser disc player i have has one of those auto reverse mechanisms in it. it's a nice feature to have. i hear there were hd laser disc players too couldn't some dvd players play cd videos?
Hello, I have problems with my Video Recorder. It doesn't wanna play my tapes good and it has really bad audio with low volume. Only the first seconds it plays, it plays good audio. And if you stop the tape and play it agian it has good audio for a few seconds agian. It isn't the Vhs but the Recorder. Can you please help me with this? And also it chews on the tapes.
Hi there been watching u videos for a bit now. Just watched ur video on that laserdisc player. I have a Sony laserdisc player I've had for years. The only problem with it is the tray not going in properly sometimes I just have to fiddle with it but other then that it works fine. Thinking of hooking it up one day. I think I'll need a converter if they make one goes for s video or a/v to hdmi. Wonder if that would improve the picture quality.
My Pioneer LD-V2000 plays CAV sides fine, but on CLV it doesn't advance, I can fast forward and it shows the frames but where I release it, it stays stuck...
It's also rarely as smooth-sailing as in this video. You almost always have to maintain the player a little bit -- replace belts, re-lubricate gears and rails, re-cap the electronics, tune up the laser servo controls... And that's assuming you got hold of a player in working (or working-eligible) condition. If you have to ship it, there's a good chance something's going to get broken in transit, as the _mostly_ complete Sony laser optic module on my desk can attest.
Hi there! Watched your channel for a few weeks now, and I need some help with my Olympus movie camera. The cassette on it is jammed, and it will not eject no matter what. Is there some way that I can disassemble it and remove it? The camera is a Olympus Movie 8 VX-806 if you need to know. I cannot find any videos about it, and no reddit posts. Please respond!
it represents Film faithfully - with the benefit of it not degrading, unless you get the dreaded rot. I have an industrial Pioneer player..nothing fancy but plays everything you throw at it.
Nice video but I'm triggered every time you put a thumbprint on the optical surface. Laserdisc has no error correction. Those smudges become visible degradation of the image.
Bullshit. Video is FM modulated. The surface of the disk is also not in the focal point of the laser. Fingerprints have no effect on the picture. Laser rot on the reflective layer certainly does however.
@@12voltvids I would disagree that fingerprints have no affect on picture quality as the oils attract dust and dirt and block the optical path. But feel free to smudge up all your discs as you like. Meanwhile I’ll keep mine clean.
@@WaybackRewind let's agree to disagree. It has been proven through multiple scientific tests when the format launched. It's an FM signal. Not affected by amplitude untill the signal is below the demodulation threshold and the you would have an unplayable disk. Laser rot on the other hand creates major issues for old disks and there is nothing you can do to prevent it. Circular scratches also can create issues.
@@12voltvids we can still be friends and have different opinions. 😀 Me personally, I would never put my fingerprints on optical media whether it affects quality or not.
First of all let me just say i love your videos and channel. Thank you. I was curious if you could do a video on a vcr video head replacement and tips for alignment? I have an old Quasar 2 Head VH230 and i am trying to fix it. The vcr's symptoms with the old video head are snowy picture. Color comes and goes. I cleaned the video head , erase head and audio head. Audio is good. I replaced the video head with a Futek FV473 which is supposed to be a proper replacement. But was curious what the steps are after the initial replacement? Do i need the special tools for alignmemt? Currently the tape picks up fine. FF and RW are fine. But video is scrambled. If i play around with P guides it clears some and i get audio. But doesnt get a crisp picture.
I never had a laser disk system, but that first disk did look impressive and better quality than vcr's. A very unusual technology, i expected you to have to replace the power supply caps and droopy belts. but no. I didnt expect the psu to work.
For most of the life of the format LaserDiscs in the UK and Europe were constrained by the SCART port. When I started collecting titles in the summer of 1992 I was under the impression that I needed an NTSC/PAL player. But I bought most of my titles from the States and the picture quality was mediocre. The following year I bought a top of the range Pioneer CLD-98 from the local franchise and hooked it up through an S-Video connection. It was a revelation. I abandoned SCART completely after that.
@@najdier i didnt like the scart connector, i expected a propper screened case with round pins like a computer parallel type, but gold plated. Also there were so many cables made with horrible wire, poor quality mini coax, i made one with quality 75 ohm coax.
God damnit. Don't touch the disc with your fingers. This is an analog format. Your fingerprint WILL affect the picture. Handle only by the outside edge and spindle hole.
Do i look like i care with this beat up old disk? Also, the surface of the disk is not in the focal point for the laser so it focuses well past any fingerprints
That's incorrect. CLV discs do indeed slow down. How he described it is correct. There would be no benefit to speeding up a disc as the laser gets closer to the edge. I also know because I own a Laserdisc player and have watched it play discs when open 😉 CLV discs are also much quieter as they reach the end of a side, because they're spinning much slower.
I wonder if movies were copy protected on that format? I never owned one back then but I had a video disc player & they not used copyright protection on that format.
Years ago I invested heavy into laser discs and have a fairly large collection of them. None of my LDs have laser rot BUT I discovered that a few (not many) have warped slightly. I have no idea why they warped. I always stored them vertically. The warp is so slight that the only way you can see it is if you lay the disc on a glass surface. What happens is that when the laser gets near the outer edge of the disc the warp causes the laser to lose tracking. This is especially noticeable on CAV discs. I have no idea how to fix the warp so I no longer play my LDs.
Slight warps are not unusual for the LD format. That is why LD players have tilt correction to adjust to this. Try playing them and I’m sure most (or all) will play fine. As for your CAV issues, I think it’s more about your player needing an adjustment or you really have a badly pressed disc (I used to have a defective Criterion Robinson Crusoe on Mars that had this issue. After I exchanged it, the new one was fine).
@@widescreennavel Not all discs. I’m pretty sure many of the titles in my collection will be playable after I am dead. The issue on many titles are where they were pressed. DADC which pressed many Columbia Tri-Star titles were notorious for being really awful with a defect rate probably in the 80% region.
@@MovieGuy846 The ones that are just slightly warped (so slight that the warp is not obvious when handling the disc) will skip as the laser nears the edge of the disc. I do not have "high-end" players. Perhaps a high-end player can compensate for the outer edge warp. Some of my CAV box sets such as "Casablanca" and "The Wizard of Oz" have at least one of the discs that has a very slight warp causing the player to skip as the laser reaches the outer edge of the disc. I should do an inventory.
@@HD7100 I own 14 working players of various levels of quality and none of them have given me any playback issues on any disc with moderate warping. I would really look into your player(s) to first see if maybe you need a regreasing of the metal rails (or plastic gearing) that could be hindering movement of the laser pick-up. If you see dried grease on any of it, wipe clean first and then use a light machine oil on the metal and white lithium grease on the plastic gearing.
Hi, interesting thing about "laserdisc rot", but does this also apply on normal DVD's? I think I have these trouble too with some DVD's although I don't know if that is DVD rot or not?
It's theoretically possible for any optical disk format where halves of a disk are adhered together, which DVDs are. There's another kind of rot that I believe is a bacteria that eats aluminum. It ends up creating jagged lines through the reflective surface. Kind of looks like a miniature ant farm lives in there. I had that happen to a CD-ROM disc.
Been a ld nut for the last 15 years. So many movies I've discovered that absolutely shit over the shit that's being pumped out to fill another streaming service.
Yeah, it really doesn't matter how much 4k HDR the picture is or how many original streaming service movies there are to choose from, when it's all crap. Pick a random laserdisc movie and the odds of it being good seem much higher.
100% guaranteed it was shot on either hi8 or betacam. Hi8 as an acquisition format was actually very good. The source tape was updubbed to betacam SP and then edited, or digitized directly off the source tape. Mist likely camera used for say the shots on the jet boat would have been a ccdvx3. That was a 3ccd handycam that put out a broadcastable picture.
Laserdisk's are pretty cool. And that cd video thing i had never heard of. Speaking of digitizing analog stuff like vhs, what's the easiest way of doing that? Would for example the Elgato Video Capture thing be a decent choice?
You might want to look into getting a Retro-Tink 5x. It's a product designed by an engineer in his spare time, mostly for older video game consoles. But, it is particularly adept at digitizing analog video, and has some features that could dramatically improve compatibility with digital video capture hardware that wants a stable 60Hz video source.
I have an old player from a Video game. It was a helicopter game. I forget the name. That was from the early 80s. I just took it out and still have it in my closet up the stairs. Just put it away.
My friend had a laserdisc that he lent me when he went overseas one summer. I had a BRILIANT idea: Buy a JVC S-VHS deck and make copies of his laserdiscs. On paper, the copies should be almost identical in quality. It was one of my greatest disappointments. The quality of the S-VHS recordings was worse than store-bought VHS tapes. (Yes, the dubs of the Laserdisc were higher resolution, but the color and graininess of the S-VHS copies made it worse.) I also discovered how bad Laserdisc video can look when they got even minor smudges and imperfections on the disc. I didn't know back then that the video encoding was analog. It wasn't something that they advertised about the format. Most of DVDs problems were with the early discs and hardware. All the first releases were on single layer discs. They usually weren't anamorphic. (The first release of Titanic had the black bars hardcoded.) The encoders used to digitize and compress the video were bad. The TVs at that time had comb filters that helped to sharpen the video from VCRs. Most TVs had no way to disable these filters. They made the artificating from DVDs and (especially) satellite TV worse.
Laserdisc is capable of a good quality picture with excellent sound, but the performance is greatly dependant on how well a player is aligned and how good the film transfer was, a lot suffered from poor transfers giving a soft image. As you say the format was analog and suffered from drop outs on bad discs. It was way too expensive when released, and was a playback only format, you need to see a good disc on a high end Japan only model to see it at it's best.
The video signal is technically analog, but it really straddles the line. We're used to thinking of analog and digital being completely separate things, but it's really more of a philosophical distinction. It's all just waveforms, and it depends how it's interpreted that makes it analog or digital. The "analog" video is a PWM signal, so basically a square wave with a variable duty cycle. The variation in duty cycle is used to express the amplitude of the analog waveform, which is a high-frequency (RF) wave modulated by the composite video components (color and luminance), and the audio tracks, which are all centered on different carrier frequencies. There are a pair of modulated analog audio tracks, and then a completely separate (well, in NTSC anyway) digital audio track. The analog tracks can be repurposed to hold AC3 (Dolby Digital discrete surround), but it has to be demodulated from the band-passed RF waveform as read directly from the disc..
@@nickwallette6201 It is the sound quality that makes laserdisc so good, and it's a great shame that the format was killed off by DVD, which was inferior when released. Blocky images and compressed audio were a poor start for DVD. I am lucky to have the best players that Pioneer made for the Japan only market they are a big stepup from the midrange models that sold in the rest of the world.
@@Barbarapape Well, it gives and it takes. You get uncompressed CD-quality stereo digital audio instead of 384Kbps to spread between 5 and a quarter discrete channels. No MPEG, but it'll only ever be interlaced, and it'll only be as good as a composite signal can be. But, IMO, who cares? I got into LD because it's magical to watch video from an enormous coaster spinning at irresponsible speeds. And, then there's the occasional historical gem (like when Han shot first) that makes it a little more special. I've got two players, both currently under repair, and both chosen for silly aesthetic reasons. I figured, if I wanted the ultimate in quality, I'd watch a Blu-ray. This is just for fun.
@@12voltvids damn remotes! I took apart my old VCR remote, washed the keypad with soap and water, then applied Isopropanol to the bottoms of the keys and the circuit board. All the keys work now!
Sure they can still make them but they don't. The format was replaced by the DVD and then the Blu-ray. The laserdisk recorded an analog FM carrier with the video modulating that carrier. This was good in it's day but FM signals are relatively noisey and use tons of bandwidth hence the size of the disk. Like everything else they have been obsoleted by better technology.
If you eat 12 greasy sausages first, without wiping your incredibly large fingers off in a paper towel and then touch the Laserdisc surface like you demonstrate here, then it'll fill out those bad scratches and you'll be free from using that Brasso. 😄😉 It was hard to watch, having been one of those who never touched the surface ever. Still having a European CLD-2950 with dual-side Laser-pickup and discs are still watchable on our 50" Panasonic G10 Plasma from 2009. Picture qualitywise, everything really depended on the source material/mastering. The remasters for the BluRay and eventually 4K format has worked wonders I'd say. The reason behind Laserdiscs could show a better picture quality than DVD is based upon the digital MPEG-compression slash bitrate with DVD, where fast movements or panning would show artifacts such as macroblocking in certain areas of the picture whereas Laserdiscs would show the details that was lost on the DVD.
CD video is notorious for disc rot. Being gold, you can see the colour difference on the disc where it’s rotted. I’ve been collecting them for a few years, and it’s a lottery….
I personally also feel it depends on the manufacturer too...I have many CDs by TDK & MAXWELL,from the late 90s and 2000s,that are still in great condition with crisp Audio quality
@@Sans_Solo_ Stanley plays at a much higher level than Hendrix ever did. In the concert i have he plays 2 guitars at once. Left hand tapping on neck and right hand playing s second guitar on a stand.
Might be able to use a buffing compound like rottenstone mixed with alcohol as a polish for the fine scratches. Don't use water. Lds worst enemy is H2O and high humidity.
I’ve been into laserdisc for a few years, up over 100 odd discs now. Player is a Pioneer DVL-909. Some of the discs look amazing. I upscale them through a Marantz SR6014 receiver. More than once friends have been fooled into thinking they were watching a blu ray. I’ve got a pressing of War Of The Worlds that leaps off the screen at you. Brilliant
I have over 100 disks. Many very rare. Have the entire Disney classic films. The ones before cancel culture and the woke crowd had them all censored. Have many classics and concerts. Both 8" and 12" disks.
@@12voltvids I just cherry pick stuff now. I’m in Sydney, there’s a pretty good market down here for people selling LD’s, not as many as over there no doubt. I haven’t bought a CD video disc in a while tho….last batch I bought, 4 out of 5 discs were unwatchable.
But to prove I’m a total idiot, I’ve been playing with CEDs of late 😂
Your in Sydney and collecting CEDs? Wow, they aren't exactly light shipping. I know the UK got PAL CEDs, but I don't think Australia got CEDs. Or did they? Otherwise everything is overseas shipping for you. I got a ton of CEDs, a local pickup last year doubled the amount I had in one day. I've been collecting VHDs of late, of course that's all overseas shipping from Japan mostly. eBay seller in U.S. with VHD always seem to hike the price up way too far. Even with cheap shipping in U.S. its often not worth it. So I just wait for cheap options from Japan, then group ship it all at once if the timing lines up.
About the CD Video: Techmoan did a video about it, because of the special reflective coating used, they suffered severely from laser rot and the first to go out for good was the audio, than came the noisy picture.
Excellent, Dave. Having never gotten into Laserdisk, I didn’t realize that the information on these disks was so visible to the naked eye. It certainly isn’t on CDs or DVDs. Great, eye-opening video. Thanks for taking the time to record and share👍
There are some DVD's where you can visibly make out sectors and that is DVD-RAM. Though it is CLV it has clearly visible sectors as it was intended to use as a live harddisk. It tried it to use like that but sloooow. I now used it to just archive stuff.
Cd's are basically CLV only, plus they don't have the same synch portions a laserdisc needs for video, audiocd's are digital audio. Though you can see tiny circles where there is some seconds of silence between songs, so you can make out the chapters and where the recording ends if the disc is not full.
A cdvideo is a hybrid between audio cd and video and you can clearly see the transition there between the two where the audio portion stops and the video porrtion starts.
I had a pioneer that I dug out of an elementary school dumpster in 03. The tray had been broken but was thrown out with player..... At that time I had plenty of time to puzzle piece it back together and clean what look like soda off the boards. It worked for about a year and I watch all kinds of stuff from the thrift store and pawn shops. Even loaned it to a friend's grandpa so he could record lonesome dove series in a computer.
Thank you for the explanation of how a laser disc is actually encoded...
LD AC-3 Dolby Digital & DTS soundtracks still blows me away in 2022!
And am comparing it to Dolby Atmos!
Won’t be getting rid of my Laser Disc Setup any time soon! 👍
Gotta love the cord over the tv!
That was a nice touch. I love it when you see an actual working shop versus a studio
I still have a Pioneer CLD-103 and LDV-4400 players and lots of Criterion Laserdiscs. Thanks for sharing your fixes.
I have too many disks. Got them from a neighbour. Their son was an animator for Pixar and got the cancer from sitting in front of silicon graphics x-ray machines 18 hours a day. He had a big collection and a Yamaha player. His parents gave it all to me when he died. I would have really like the Wurlitzer juke box they have though.
Do not use Brasso. It makes things worse. I tried on a scratched CD. What I found works is wet sanding with 1000+ grit for the deep grooves, then automotive buffing and polishing compound. I tried by hand, but you really need a polishing pad on a electric tool. I'd try it out on a crap CD first :)
Had a Pioneer 1750 here in UK for both PAL/NTSC playback. Loved it and thinking of getting another. Only thing the format struggled with was deep reds. Great vid man, amazed it fired up after all these years 👍
Like other videocomposite formats, red and blue colors have poor resolution resulting in blurred images and color bleeding into other objects in the frame. Luminance always have the highest bandwidth, while chroma and saturation has very poor bandwidth; as such videocomposite formats seem sharper with B/W films !
Few years ago I looked up the block diagram of a Laserdisc player, and find out while the signal on the disc is composite video, but it's a modified composite video. The player separates the Y and C signals, and processes them individually, then merges them at the output to produce a standard composite signal. So this thing probably gives better picture with its S-Video output, because it skips the merging of the processed Y and C signals, and separating them again in the TV or capture card.
That really depends on the player. Later models will base their composite from the Y/C separated signal but earlier models will take composite direct to the composite output. So it depends on the quality of the Y/C Separator in the player vs the Comb Filter on a TV that determines what signal looks the best. In most cases the composite will be better but you just have to try both options to see what looks more pleasing to you.
The s-video output from my Pioneer DVL-700 produces a sharper picture than the composite output. Small texts/titles are sharper with the s-video output.
Great video. You helped me out with my player a few years back, I still watch laserdiscs regularly.
Those plastic inner sleeves w/ the rounded bottoms: we used to call 'em "elephant condoms."
Crazy seeing Shotover Jet footage from 1989 that still looks almost exactly how it was when I went there a couple of years ago
Got an old what was at the time Top of the Line PIoneer LD-S9. Still use it form time to time to archive LD's to DVD for the occasional LD that's not available on any digital format like DVD or Blu Ray
I started my laserdisc journey only 3 years ago. Picked up a new in box Sony MDP-MR1 with 30 big name titles very cheap and it works great. Only issue the player had was the discs would stick to the top clamp. The glue that held the magnet had leaked slightly. I cleaned it and all good :) My player will play both sides without removing the disc.
I recall being sent out to install one at the Baseball Hall O Fame in Cooperstown. The display ran continuously for tourists so were perfect in that application.
in the mid 90s, someone gave me a Panasonic from the late 80s, and two milk crates full of discs. It plays but the video on screen is a little mixed up. Ive never taken it apart to investigate. Then in the early 2000s someone gave me a Pioneer player from the 90s and more discs. I was told it had low hours and worked but Ive never tried it. I always loved Lazerdisks, a big step above VHS IMO. Along with the Pioneer unit they had a Dragon's Lair arcade game disk. Supposedly you can play the game using the remote control, which i do have. One day i'll have to break it out and stroll down memory lane. Thanks for sharing Dave!
That Kirk Whalum presentation featured in chapter 3 is probably really rare on the internet.
It's not worth getting a copyright strike over. B
Have you digitized this stuff yet? I'd love to see more of this stuff. Especially the demo discs!
I'd heard of them but never seen them.
Not yet I haven't.
for me i own 9 laserdisc players and tons of movies on the format. i even have the beatles anthology 8 volume set on laserdisc and even the documentary of the beatles called the complete beatles. love the format. also i have a holly grail of laserdisc players the last model ever made by pioneer but an early revision of the model. its a pioneer dvl-919 a dvd laserdisc player that fully works no problems. i myself i prefer the auto flip units. i own 5 auto flip units one being a karaoke unit. anymore if a movie released on it this is the only way i want the movie on laserdisc. i do have a few concerts on laserdisc as well some that might be rare and some that might not be. but as i said i love the format.
If you can find any of the higher end Japan only players at a sensible price, treat yourself, the HLD-X9 is a superb well engineered player
capable of showing the format at it's best, some of the japanese pressing also have superior transfers, you just have to put up wth the subtitles.
After all these years the format is still highly collectable.
Get a Domesday Duplicator for the ultimate laserdisc archival.
The ability to get multiple audio channels, like remove dialogue from some films, is still unique. I owned several, they all broke and never worked consistently, but I loved them still.
DVDs support tons of audio channels.
@@eDoc2020 But on some settings on some audio types in LD you had the option of ducking the dialog and listening to the background music, which was cool for some of the classic Disney things, you could hear incidental music. I haven't seen a DVD or Blu Ray player that offers this specific thing.
@@widescreennavel I don't think LD has any specific provision for disabling dialog. Likewise DVD's audio channels can be used for anything so there's no reason they couldn't master DVDs with one track missing dialog.
If it's a setting built into the player itself, my guess is it just disables the center channel. Assuming the player only decodes the stereo audio tracks this would mean only keeping the difference between the two channels and cancelling the common signals.
@@eDoc2020 It had two types of audio and two types of discs. I had them, and the discs themselves told you what types of things were offered audio wise. You can trust me. It's real. Check out this link, it might help you out: ua-cam.com/video/UB1q5VgN9YY/v-deo.html
@@eDoc2020 true, but I have yet to see a DVD player with multiple outputs to get simultaneous dual audio channels. LD can output multiple channels.
what a lot of people dont realize at least of this current generation is that the digital surround sound platform for home theater was built off Laserdiscs and not DVD. It played a huge part in the evolution of digital sound for Home theater. Lucasfilms use that format as the base for their THX program that set the standard for home theater in the late 80,s through the 90,s. They had their own remastering program to get the picture and sound quality from the discs and units that played the. Pioneer also invested a lot of money and time into the format.
With many hundreds of discs and over 10 players you could call me a Laserdisc fan.
I was late in starting to collecting laserdiscs in about 1994, by 2000 it was sadly brought to an end.
Most of my collection have been bought in recent years now that the prices have dropped to sensible levels.
Laserdisc is the only way to watch uncut and original films, the cartoon discs are highly collectable
as as the disney box sets and Star Wars.
As for the players, here in the UK we only had flimsy mid range models, i had to import most of my players
from the USA and Japan, the Japan only models are by far the best, but were not cheap, my HLD-X9 cost
about £1500 approx $1950, i had it serviced by Pioneer in Japan before shipping.
The HLD-X9 can even play some of the rotted discs the other player won't, i didn't bother with a muse decoder
the price of the discs are still way too high.
Sadly the format was ousted by DVD, which at the start was inferior, and the audio from laserdisc is still far better
than DVD's compressed sound quality.
DTS laserdiscs can even give Blu-Ray a run for it's money, the format was just too expensive for playback only.
Recordable laserdiscs were made but only for industrial use.
If you can find a good working player and a collection of discs buy it, the format paved the way for all the features
that are now on DVD and Blu-Ray.
I would call that a disease.
@@12voltvids The sad part is that there is no cure, someday i will get round to watching them if the players last that long!
Never had a Laserdisk player, but was also a big Bowie fan and did get that box set. Always wondered why I couldn't play the gold CD video.
I thought i was a Bowie fan.... Until I bought that box set. Then i discovered that i really wasn't a fan.
What an amazing piece of old technology...and this was released at the same time video tape was out, yet it did not gain market popularity over the VCR...Maybe because it was too "new" at the time and expensive to produce, thus consumer went for the cheaper option.
It's because they didn't record. If a recordable disc format had emerged at the same time as VHS there would not have been a VHS.
Back then however most people were watching TV on their "19" Hitachi" so they couldn't see the difference anyway. Back then I was watching my VCR on my 13" all tube AGS. Wish i had hung onto that set.
Dave I sold the pioneer model back in 81, we played alien and superman in the store all day. very expensive for 1981 i think it was $1,200 with one movie.
Nice video, I was using them form day one, still have about 250 discs, have a couple of players still working a Pioneer and a Marantz. And yes I found the first batches of DVD that comes out the LD copy was better, but the encoding on the DVD got better very quickly and I found better than LD, have a lot of music LD's
I collected CDV singles and I have about 150 of them along with 20-30 8" CD-Videos
When referring to "well built" electronics, people always points to Sony, but actually Panasonic is very reliable. Things from 70's and 80's most likely still work fine, some even with their original belts ! Panasonic used matsushita components which were (and still are) high quality. It's rare for a panasonic device to require recapping (with the exception of sub-assembly they bought entirely from third party, like Philips CD mechanism)
The music (and sound) on that Sony Promotional LD is CX encoded, I'd assume, based on the feature of the logo on the labels. Just saying, for those who didn't know.
The analog FM audio tracks are cx encoded but this player and disk also has digital stereo sound.
Nice, thats the tag line from techmoan's video. Cassettes better then you dont remember.
Novus plastic restoration kits will fix the scratches.
They also adapted this system for Karaoke systems!
I have a Sony MDP 850d player, and about 40 discs. I found it to have a grainy image...but it was (at the time) connected to my monitor by an av switch, into my Sony Lbt 905, then to composite to VGA conversation. I'm getting a plasma TV soon, to test it on that.
I saw a video where someone cut vinyl grooves into a laserdisc, then tried to play it, the result was surprising: the audio was gone, but the picture was still fully there! 😨
Once you get it digitized I would be interested in that Airshow footage.
if you can't post it on youtube then on DVD or (gasp!) VHS
These things look awesome on an old CRT television!
They look awesome on my SD plasma too.
@@12voltvids Oh I bet!
Ya I was in to Laserdisc for since the 90 s but I got my Laserdisc player was a Genexxa and it’s was Kareoke one and I had 1disc We went through a fire some one picked up it and I lost it so,last year I had a great friend that had a great Pioneer Laserdisc player some i traded my turntable for its then a month after that I got some Laserdisc movies i have 70 now i love it
I have a few hundred including star wars, return of the Jedi, empire strikes back. Beatles help, hard days night and yellow submarine. All the original Disney classics, godfather 1 2 and 3. A bunch of concerts. I haven't even watch most of them.
We had one in the 80's
The late release lds definitely looked better than dvd
Only one store in my area ever had laserdiscs for renting. Hollywood video did but they only had a shelf of 10 of them. I dont know if they ever went out either.
I've heard it called bit rot before. It'll give a staticky sound with bad picture.
To watch LDs the way they played in their era it would be best to use an analog TV. I use my old players in a new setup with a modern TV, too many digital artifacts.
Great video. I amassed a collection of over 1200 laserdiscs, and at one point owned 4 players of varying quality. The discs are in great shape, but they start to skip and stop playing at around the 13 min mark of each film on my higher end player. Guessing the bands have to be replaced? Is there any place I can get my Pioneer LD player repaired? I live in Chicago.
Thanks. Could you please also make a video about 8mm projectors and how you can repair sound part of perjecors because mostly perjecors are 50 years old and they defected sound part. Again thanks for your videos and you thought us so many things. I'm your long time fan from begging of your videos on you tube. I wish I'll see you one day 🌹🌹🌹🌹❤️❤️❤️🙏🙏🙏👌👍
I knew it was the best the NTSC system could offer in 1998 when I bought my first and only player. The transfers were junk on many disks. Magavision disks were junk.
I also bought it for widescreen Star Wars.
Anything with MAGA in it is a joke.
Nope. It's better than what I remember.
the laser disc player i have has one of those auto reverse mechanisms in it. it's a nice feature to have. i hear there were hd laser disc players too
couldn't some dvd players play cd videos?
DVD players played video CD (vcd and svcd) not CD video.
Vcd was mpg1 digital video. Svcd was mpg2 ipb digital. CD video was analog
HD laser discs used the MUSE Hivision, wasn't really used other than Japan and Hong Kong.
@@12voltvids I want one that plays everything
Hello, I have problems with my Video Recorder. It doesn't wanna play my tapes good and it has really bad audio with low volume. Only the first seconds it plays, it plays good audio. And if you stop the tape and play it agian it has good audio for a few seconds agian. It isn't the Vhs but the Recorder. Can you please help me with this? And also it chews on the tapes.
Hi there been watching u videos for a bit now. Just watched ur video on that laserdisc player. I have a Sony laserdisc player I've had for years. The only problem with it is the tray not going in properly sometimes I just have to fiddle with it but other then that it works fine. Thinking of hooking it up one day. I think I'll need a converter if they make one goes for s video or a/v to hdmi. Wonder if that would improve the picture quality.
My Pioneer LD-V2000 plays CAV sides fine, but on CLV it doesn't advance, I can fast forward and it shows the frames but where I release it, it stays stuck...
I have the same disk. It is one of the best Sony demo LD.
I'd love to find a Laserdisc player but man are they expensive right now.
It's also rarely as smooth-sailing as in this video. You almost always have to maintain the player a little bit -- replace belts, re-lubricate gears and rails, re-cap the electronics, tune up the laser servo controls... And that's assuming you got hold of a player in working (or working-eligible) condition. If you have to ship it, there's a good chance something's going to get broken in transit, as the _mostly_ complete Sony laser optic module on my desk can attest.
Someone was using a laserdisc as a turntable slipmat on UA-cam and It looked cool.
Hi there! Watched your channel for a few weeks now, and I need some help with my Olympus movie camera. The cassette on it is jammed, and it will not eject no matter what. Is there some way that I can disassemble it and remove it? The camera is a Olympus Movie 8 VX-806 if you need to know. I cannot find any videos about it, and no reddit posts. Please respond!
it represents Film faithfully - with the benefit of it not degrading, unless you get the dreaded rot. I have an industrial Pioneer player..nothing fancy but plays everything you throw at it.
I have 3 pioneers a Yamaha and this Panasonic. 2 of the pioneer are both side play and one plays DVD too.
No compression. For standard definition it was the best we had.
riiiiiiight
Nice video but I'm triggered every time you put a thumbprint on the optical surface. Laserdisc has no error correction. Those smudges become visible degradation of the image.
Bullshit. Video is FM modulated. The surface of the disk is also not in the focal point of the laser. Fingerprints have no effect on the picture. Laser rot on the reflective layer certainly does however.
@@12voltvids I would disagree that fingerprints have no affect on picture quality as the oils attract dust and dirt and block the optical path. But feel free to smudge up all your discs as you like. Meanwhile I’ll keep mine clean.
@@WaybackRewind let's agree to disagree. It has been proven through multiple scientific tests when the format launched. It's an FM signal. Not affected by amplitude untill the signal is below the demodulation threshold and the you would have an unplayable disk. Laser rot on the other hand creates major issues for old disks and there is nothing you can do to prevent it. Circular scratches also can create issues.
@@12voltvids we can still be friends and have different opinions. 😀
Me personally, I would never put my fingerprints on optical media whether it affects quality or not.
First of all let me just say i love your videos and channel. Thank you. I was curious if you could do a video on a vcr video head replacement and tips for alignment? I have an old Quasar 2 Head VH230 and i am trying to fix it. The vcr's symptoms with the old video head are snowy picture. Color comes and goes. I cleaned the video head , erase head and audio head. Audio is good. I replaced the video head with a Futek FV473 which is supposed to be a proper replacement. But was curious what the steps are after the initial replacement? Do i need the special tools for alignmemt? Currently the tape picks up fine. FF and RW are fine. But video is scrambled. If i play around with P guides it clears some and i get audio. But doesnt get a crisp picture.
The good old 90's
I never had a laser disk system, but that first disk did look impressive and better quality than vcr's.
A very unusual technology, i expected you to have to replace the power supply caps and droopy belts. but no.
I didnt expect the psu to work.
For most of the life of the format LaserDiscs in the UK and Europe were constrained by the SCART port. When I started collecting titles in the summer of 1992 I was under the impression that I needed an NTSC/PAL player. But I bought most of my titles from the States and the picture quality was mediocre. The following year I bought a top of the range Pioneer CLD-98 from the local franchise and hooked it up through an S-Video connection. It was a revelation. I abandoned SCART completely after that.
@@najdier i didnt like the scart connector, i expected a propper screened case with round pins like a computer parallel type, but gold plated.
Also there were so many cables made with horrible wire, poor quality mini coax, i made one with quality 75 ohm coax.
God damnit. Don't touch the disc with your fingers. This is an analog format. Your fingerprint WILL affect the picture. Handle only by the outside edge and spindle hole.
Do i look like i care with this beat up old disk? Also, the surface of the disk is not in the focal point for the laser so it focuses well past any fingerprints
It actually speeds up as you go further away from the center on a disk. Apart from that, a very informative video. Thanks for sharing!
That's incorrect. CLV discs do indeed slow down. How he described it is correct. There would be no benefit to speeding up a disc as the laser gets closer to the edge.
I also know because I own a Laserdisc player and have watched it play discs when open 😉 CLV discs are also much quieter as they reach the end of a side, because they're spinning much slower.
No it doesn't just like regular audio CDs are CLV which means they have to slow down to maintain the same linear speed as the circunference increases.
@@t0nito no I meant as in a regular spinning disc
I wonder if movies were copy protected on that format? I never owned one back then but I had a video disc player & they not used copyright protection on that format.
It would be possible to encode them with MacroVision, but other than NTSC vs. PAL, there's no region encoding or other DRM.
Laserdiscs had no copy protection on them whatsoever.
Years ago I invested heavy into laser discs and have a fairly large collection of them. None of my LDs have laser rot BUT I discovered that a few (not many) have warped slightly. I have no idea why they warped. I always stored them vertically. The warp is so slight that the only way you can see it is if you lay the disc on a glass surface. What happens is that when the laser gets near the outer edge of the disc the warp causes the laser to lose tracking. This is especially noticeable on CAV discs. I have no idea how to fix the warp so I no longer play my LDs.
They also rot, and most of the ones I bought, maybe manufactured late in the years of LD, succumed top rot in just a year or two.
Slight warps are not unusual for the LD format. That is why LD players have tilt correction to adjust to this. Try playing them and I’m sure most (or all) will play fine. As for your CAV issues, I think it’s more about your player needing an adjustment or you really have a badly pressed disc (I used to have a defective Criterion Robinson Crusoe on Mars that had this issue. After I exchanged it, the new one was fine).
@@widescreennavel Not all discs. I’m pretty sure many of the titles in my collection will be playable after I am dead.
The issue on many titles are where they were pressed. DADC which pressed many Columbia Tri-Star titles were notorious for being really awful with a defect rate probably in the 80% region.
@@MovieGuy846 The ones that are just slightly warped (so slight that the warp is not obvious when handling the disc) will skip as the laser nears the edge of the disc. I do not have "high-end" players. Perhaps a high-end player can compensate for the outer edge warp. Some of my CAV box sets such as "Casablanca" and "The Wizard of Oz" have at least one of the discs that has a very slight warp causing the player to skip as the laser reaches the outer edge of the disc. I should do an inventory.
@@HD7100 I own 14 working players of various levels of quality and none of them have given me any playback issues on any disc with moderate warping. I would really look into your player(s) to first see if maybe you need a regreasing of the metal rails (or plastic gearing) that could be hindering movement of the laser pick-up. If you see dried grease on any of it, wipe clean first and then use a light machine oil on the metal and white lithium grease on the plastic gearing.
Hi, interesting thing about "laserdisc rot", but does this also apply on normal DVD's? I think I have these trouble too with some DVD's although I don't know if that is DVD rot or not?
It's theoretically possible for any optical disk format where halves of a disk are adhered together, which DVDs are.
There's another kind of rot that I believe is a bacteria that eats aluminum. It ends up creating jagged lines through the reflective surface. Kind of looks like a miniature ant farm lives in there. I had that happen to a CD-ROM disc.
DVD and Blu-ray disc are the best!
Been a ld nut for the last 15 years. So many movies I've discovered that absolutely shit over the shit that's being pumped out to fill another streaming service.
Yeah, it really doesn't matter how much 4k HDR the picture is or how many original streaming service movies there are to choose from, when it's all crap.
Pick a random laserdisc movie and the odds of it being good seem much higher.
Did you ever do a video on the RCA CED Video disk??
I wonder if a headlight restoration kit would work for buffing out scratches.
there are methods to buff out scratches on LD - similar methods to CD and DVD.
Braaso works wonders.
What TV are you using in the video?
None of the video on the demo disc looks like it was recorded on film. Do you know what they used back then to record that source material?
100% guaranteed it was shot on either hi8 or betacam. Hi8 as an acquisition format was actually very good. The source tape was updubbed to betacam SP and then edited, or digitized directly off the source tape. Mist likely camera used for say the shots on the jet boat would have been a ccdvx3. That was a 3ccd handycam that put out a broadcastable picture.
Laserdisk's are pretty cool. And that cd video thing i had never heard of. Speaking of digitizing analog stuff like vhs, what's the easiest way of doing that? Would for example the Elgato Video Capture thing be a decent choice?
You might want to look into getting a Retro-Tink 5x. It's a product designed by an engineer in his spare time, mostly for older video game consoles. But, it is particularly adept at digitizing analog video, and has some features that could dramatically improve compatibility with digital video capture hardware that wants a stable 60Hz video source.
@@nickwallette6201 but doesn't retro tink not have s-video support?
Elgato would be another option.
This disk can be used in old machine
I have an old player from a Video game. It was a helicopter game. I forget the name. That was from the early 80s. I just took it out and still have it in my closet up the stairs. Just put it away.
Wanna sell it?
Cobra Command by Data East in 1984.
@@TMS5100 That was it!
@@cookingwithjesus I might.
Is that Panasonic tv a plasma?
My friend had a laserdisc that he lent me when he went overseas one summer. I had a BRILIANT idea: Buy a JVC S-VHS deck and make copies of his laserdiscs. On paper, the copies should be almost identical in quality. It was one of my greatest disappointments. The quality of the S-VHS recordings was worse than store-bought VHS tapes. (Yes, the dubs of the Laserdisc were higher resolution, but the color and graininess of the S-VHS copies made it worse.) I also discovered how bad Laserdisc video can look when they got even minor smudges and imperfections on the disc. I didn't know back then that the video encoding was analog. It wasn't something that they advertised about the format.
Most of DVDs problems were with the early discs and hardware. All the first releases were on single layer discs. They usually weren't anamorphic. (The first release of Titanic had the black bars hardcoded.) The encoders used to digitize and compress the video were bad. The TVs at that time had comb filters that helped to sharpen the video from VCRs. Most TVs had no way to disable these filters. They made the artificating from DVDs and (especially) satellite TV worse.
Laserdisc is capable of a good quality picture with excellent sound, but the performance is greatly dependant on how well a player is aligned
and how good the film transfer was, a lot suffered from poor transfers giving a soft image.
As you say the format was analog and suffered from drop outs on bad discs.
It was way too expensive when released, and was a playback only format, you need to see a good disc on a high end Japan only model
to see it at it's best.
The video signal is technically analog, but it really straddles the line. We're used to thinking of analog and digital being completely separate things, but it's really more of a philosophical distinction. It's all just waveforms, and it depends how it's interpreted that makes it analog or digital.
The "analog" video is a PWM signal, so basically a square wave with a variable duty cycle. The variation in duty cycle is used to express the amplitude of the analog waveform, which is a high-frequency (RF) wave modulated by the composite video components (color and luminance), and the audio tracks, which are all centered on different carrier frequencies.
There are a pair of modulated analog audio tracks, and then a completely separate (well, in NTSC anyway) digital audio track. The analog tracks can be repurposed to hold AC3 (Dolby Digital discrete surround), but it has to be demodulated from the band-passed RF waveform as read directly from the disc..
@@nickwallette6201 It is the sound quality that makes laserdisc so good, and it's a great shame that the format was killed off by DVD, which was inferior when released.
Blocky images and compressed audio were a poor start for DVD.
I am lucky to have the best players that Pioneer made for the Japan only market
they are a big stepup from the midrange models that sold in the rest of the world.
@@Barbarapape Well, it gives and it takes. You get uncompressed CD-quality stereo digital audio instead of 384Kbps to spread between 5 and a quarter discrete channels.
No MPEG, but it'll only ever be interlaced, and it'll only be as good as a composite signal can be.
But, IMO, who cares? I got into LD because it's magical to watch video from an enormous coaster spinning at irresponsible speeds. And, then there's the occasional historical gem (like when Han shot first) that makes it a little more special.
I've got two players, both currently under repair, and both chosen for silly aesthetic reasons. I figured, if I wanted the ultimate in quality, I'd watch a Blu-ray. This is just for fun.
It looks stretched to fit 16:9!
I have the aspect set to wide fit. The original remote in flaky which is what is needed for change aspect.
@@12voltvids damn remotes! I took apart my old VCR remote, washed the keypad with soap and water, then applied Isopropanol to the bottoms of the keys and the circuit board. All the keys work now!
@@dhpbear2 this one is in sad shape. Buttons work but case is all cracked and falling apart.
Can laser discs be recorded in modern times?
Sure they can still make them but they don't. The format was replaced by the DVD and then the Blu-ray. The laserdisk recorded an analog FM carrier with the video modulating that carrier. This was good in it's day but FM signals are relatively noisey and use tons of bandwidth hence the size of the disk. Like everything else they have been obsoleted by better technology.
If you eat 12 greasy sausages first, without wiping your incredibly large fingers off in a paper towel and then touch the Laserdisc surface like you demonstrate here, then it'll fill out those bad scratches and you'll be free from using that Brasso. 😄😉
It was hard to watch, having been one of those who never touched the surface ever.
Still having a European CLD-2950 with dual-side Laser-pickup and discs are still watchable on our 50" Panasonic G10 Plasma from 2009.
Picture qualitywise, everything really depended on the source material/mastering. The remasters for the BluRay and eventually 4K format has worked wonders I'd say.
The reason behind Laserdiscs could show a better picture quality than DVD is based upon the digital MPEG-compression slash bitrate with DVD, where fast movements or panning would show artifacts such as macroblocking in certain areas of the picture whereas Laserdiscs would show the details that was lost on the DVD.
just wondering how long to laser disks really last for before disc rot starts and what can be done about the problem ????
Some went bad after a few years and others are 40 years old and still play fine.
You can't do anything about it.
CD video is notorious for disc rot. Being gold, you can see the colour difference on the disc where it’s rotted. I’ve been collecting them for a few years, and it’s a lottery….
I personally also feel it depends on the manufacturer too...I have many CDs by TDK & MAXWELL,from the late 90s and 2000s,that are still in great condition with crisp Audio quality
I remember Robert Cray....you remember Stanley Jordan guitarist? When to one of his concert's in 1989
I have Stanley Jordan concert.
@@12voltvids Cool! Stanley is very good almost Hendrix level
@@Sans_Solo_ Stanley plays at a much higher level than Hendrix ever did. In the concert i have he plays 2 guitars at once. Left hand tapping on neck and right hand playing s second guitar on a stand.
@@12voltvids Yes his dual hand dexterity is unmatched.....but Hendrix, in my opinion, has slightly superior rhythm development within a song
@@Sans_Solo_
Now if only Hendrix played jazz.
PBDE,s used for fire retardant on the casings. Don't help
still frame & pause were 2 different buttons on the remote.
I do have the remote for it.
Dam don’t be putting your finger all over the disk yikes. Noob
Might be able to use a buffing compound like rottenstone mixed with alcohol as a polish for the fine scratches. Don't use water. Lds worst enemy is H2O and high humidity.