Laserdisc failed format that didn't fail - Lasted from 1978 to 2001 

To everyone about my comment on cropping... I meant there is only so much vertical resolution in the recording format which is 4:3 by definition and letterboxing uses less of it so the resultant image has less resolution than it would as full 4:3 frame. In that sense the recording is "cropped", not the original image itself. In order to display the full image on my 16:9 TV I had to crop off the black bars, otherwise there would be bars on the left and right and top and bottom. Maybe I didn't use the right terminology to express that thought.

Near the end of Laserdisc it had a HD version only in Japan.

Great Video - thanks. It’s 2023 and I have around 600 laserdiscs and six players. Why? Because they are a wonderful way to own movies. The packaging allows for great album style art, with sleeve notes and production stills. They were the first format which introduced “extras” such as commentaries and deleted scenes. Viewing one and opening an LD tray is a much more ceremonial experience. Get a DTS one and they sound awesome. It cannot be about PQ - if you want 4k stream or by the UHD. If you’d like to wallow in nostalgia and love physical media, get the Laserdisc …!

The fact that the format lasted two decades means it was at least not the kind of failure that makes companies lose money. They somehow managed to manufacture it at the proper scale and make a smallish but steady profit from it. Karaoke also helped there as there was a constant demand for that type of Laserdisc for many years. It was definitely not a complete fail. By contrast, CED sure was a massive flop.

The sound is far better on laser than it is on dvd

Pioneer made laserdisc player with dvd combo all the way till December 2009. Some players were discontinued in mid 2000s. Doesnt seem like a failure. I have over 300 movies and 4 players in my collection.

I still have my Marantz LD player. One thing about LD was the sound quality. Titanic '96 THX/DTS has an awesome sound quality that was never available with DVD or Blu-Ray. I also believe there are some movies on LD still not available on any other media. My first player was a Magnavox. One downfall of LD was availability of discs. You almost had to find a store in a mall in a major city that sold them. You also had to have a AC-3 decoder for surround sound. I still use a CRT projector in my home theater. So LD for video feed into the CRT projector video processor created an awesome huge picture.

My dad had several LaserDisc players (always a Pioneer), his last one was the super baller Pioneer Elite DVL-91 DVD/LaserDisc combo I wish he still had it so badly. It's wild to me how Pioneer is more or less dead now days, I'm a Denon fan as an adult.

Laserdisc is basically studio quality composite video with 5.5-6 MHz of bandwidth. The equivalent resolution in digital units would be about 580x480 (for NTSC) - for black& white picture. Composite color makes the actual resolution hard to compare to digital. I'd estimate it at about 450x480, but that also depends on the quality of the color decoder in your TV (some high-end LD players included their own comb filters outputting through S-Video). But taking composite video limitations into account - that's gonna be as perfect as it gets at that resolution. DVDs are 720x480 (NTSC), which is significantly more horizontal resolution. That 720x480 can also refer to an anamorphic 16:9 frame, while a letterboxed LD will have the effective vertical resolution reduced to 360 lines - which further increases DVD's advantage in resolution. But that resolution comes at the cost of digital artifacting. The amount of that will depend mostly on the quality of the encode on a particular disc. Given how much video encoders have progressed over the years, even within the same codec standard, I'd say that early DVDs (late 90s to early 2000s) will probably look worse than LDs, but later DVDs (late 2000s and later) will look better.

The fallacy with the 2% market share argument is that Laserdidc was never intended for the average consumer. It was aimed specifically at what we would now call videophiles. When you look at just the target market, Laserdisc had a much larger market share in the USA, probably in the range of 20 - 25%,. That share, in conjunction with its longevity, would classify it as a success. One other ground breaking feature introduced by the Laserdisc format was audio commentary. I believe the first audio commentary was on Criterion's release of the 1933 version of King Kong (which I have in collection). Laserdisc also pioneered several other extra features, such as the inclusion of trailers, deleted scenes, etc. When I bought my Laserdisc player circa 1990, my prime incentive was the availability of titles for niche genres, particularly silent and foreign films. Many seminal titles that weren't available on VHS, could be found on Laserdisc. I have several movies on laserdisc that never received a DVD/BRD/4K release.

First time i had heard of Laserdiscs was around 2000 or so, basically at the end of the laserdisc lifecycle. That was when i got my first DVD player in summer of 2000 and 2 of my first DVDs were from a dodgy german label called Laser Paradise who were one of the few german labels who actually supported the Laserdisc Format in Germany with own releases when nobody else (except Pioneer) was doing them. So on their DVDs they also included some clips of movies from their laserdisc catalog. Like Mad Max, Mad Max 2, Hard to Kill, Hard Boiled.. and so on. These clips were taken from their Laserdiscs and i was amazed at how close to DVD quality it was but didn't know that it was an analog video format. Years later i occasionally looked up certain movies on their Laserdisc releases and was amazed at how gempacked these releases were and how many of them had extras that were not available on DVD. Like with "The Frighteners" for a while. Even audiocomentaries were (and still are) only available on Laserdisc in their original form while they often experienced some revisionism and censorship when they were added to their DVD or Blu-ray release. I started collecting them in 2014 or so when i found some Discs offered at a fleamarket. "Star Wars" was basically the main reason why i always wanted to collect them because you just can't find any DVD or Blu-ray release that looks and feels authentic regarding the color grading and sound mixes. And of course them being free from all the later effect revisionism that started in 1997. I collected a lot of titles i ALWAYS wanted to have on Laserdisc for various reasons. Mostly to have an original 90s videomaster without the Teal and Orange revisionism you have today with most remasters. And sometimes also because i wanted a certain movie in their directors approved version since Laserdisc was a format was REALLY embraced by filmmakers. Jim Cameron for example was a huge supporter of Laserdisc. And even Stanley Kubrick was given the chance to supervise and approve the release of "2001 - a space odyssey" in 1989 when Criterion released it in their Criterion Collection. Sadly that version was done only using 35mm elements and not 65mm or 70mm elements. It's also a pretty smudgy videomaster. But it's a CAV release and Kubrick himself gave it its blessing which is why it is a very important release in my collection. Sadly here in Germany Laserdisc was not all that popular because it was expensive as heck. However there are still a lot of PAL releases and PAL Laserdiscs look amazing. Even better than their NTSC counterparts.

For the longest time there were films that looked wildly better on LD than on DVD. Sometimes the DVD was badly mastered (crushed blacks, blown-out whites), sometimes they stupidly chose to use a pan-and-scan image formatted to 4:3 instead of the widescreen available on the LD. Early DVDs often were dubbed from analog videotape copies and not the original film negatives. Many more dvds had sharpening applied to the image, causing halos around everything on playback. All these factors kept LD collectors active until the blu-ray era when most (but not all) of these stupid mistakes were rectified.

The first time I saw one of these was in 1979 when I was at a mall music store in Orlando fla,the movie they was playing was smoky and the bandit.

As a collector of Laserdiscs and players, to me it was far from a failure, but was not a massive success that it could have been. It took Pioneer to make it viable after Philips attempts at launching a product that was not market ready. Here in the UK due to the rules on certification, we had to import discs and hope they were not confiscated by customs. There were a few firms who were often raided for importing them. The flimsy PAL players sold here were poor compared to the ones from the USA, the very best players were only available in Japan, this did not help the format. Compared to DVD, i feel it is better, early DVD's suffered many issues, the sound quality is still far superior to the compressed audio of DVD's. If the format had been recordable at launch, VHS/Betmax would never have been the mass market success that it was, the other reason was the cost of the discs and players.recordable discs and players would have been far too expensive. The fact that there are still working players and discs at more sensible prices to buy after all these years proves that it could have been far from a failure.

LD led to various other technologies such as LD-based arcade games (such as Dragon's Lair) and Lucasfilms' EditDroid system they invented to save time editing Empire Strikes Back, which was bought by Avid and became the Avid non-linear editing system.

Loved my Laser Disc when I had them. For the time, they had great picture and sound quality. The best was the cover art that the disc came in. My last combo player finally died in 2018 and could not find anyone to repair it.

The art work on the Laser Disk was very beautiful!!!! One day I almost purchased a Man From UNCLE (old TV Series) Laser Disk just so I could have the art work!!!! The picture so amazing!!! And I didn't even own a Laser Disk player!!!!

Thanks. I have an extensive DVD library and while it is great to watch all those movies and shows, there are strange artifacts from encoding and compression which annoy me: the halo effect. It has gotten better over the years, but is still present. Again,thans for the video.

You can hear when you spin up the disc, that is slipping a little, suggesting that the disc clamp needs a good clean, this also means that stopping will take longer, as it uses a slight reverse current supplied to the motor to provide fast stopping. If it detects any slippage of the disc in the clamp, the that assisted stopping function is disabled, hence taking an age to naturally stop. This player looks like a rebadged Pioneer. I've owned and used laservision and the relaunched laserdisc (1988) from the mid 1980s I still have a Pioneer 919 in my system, it gets occasionally used :) Nice video, thank you.

Thank you for posting this!!!! You rock dude!!!!

VHS and other VCRs may have been introduced for "Timeshifting" but selling movies on prerecorded cassettes became a thing almost immediately in 1976 the very same year of their release but they were about £80 but by 1981 some companies dropped the price to £20

i like these "old" technologies. Thanks for the video. 😎👍

Failure ? A failure doesn’t last for nearly 25 years. And it had pretty much every movie under the sun released on it during it’s life span. It can be considered more as an enthousiast focused format than mainstream

I owned a laserdisc player and collected nearly 200 laserdiscs with most of them being music videos and concerts never released on DVD or Blu-ray. I found the audio to be superior to the other formats even though it didn't keep up with the picture quality, Sadly I gave up on the format when my player conked out and no one could fix it and I didn't want to continue with a used player that will ultimately end up with its own demise.

I always saw laser disc as a very niche high end product who paved the way other subsequent optical disc formats. As other people have pointed you can’t call a product a failure if it was supported for over two decades and also improved upon. One of my favourite applications laserdisc was used for was the BBC Domesday Project. A multimedia programme that was in conjunction with an 8bit BBC Master commercial. About a decade ahead of time and a strange mixture or analog and digital technology.

I think the messy seeking and no picture on pause suggest that the particular disc is a CLV one. CAV discs should have silky smooth seeking and perfectly clear (aside from 3:2 pulldown artifacts) pause. CAV discs also should display the frame number on the player's display, instead of time. Not sure about that Jurassic Park copy of yours, but I heard that some LD movies only were CAV on side B, or on disc two if they spanned two discs - so that all those trick play features were available during the finale while conserving space for the rest of the movie.

Laserdisc on a high quality consumer crt (preferably a widescreen model) can still be incredible. I watch mine on a 32" 100hz (which eliminates flicker) widescreen crt and it still manages to blow me away at times, specially with a good sound system or surround. I was just watching The Fifth Element today and that sound mix just flies around the room like crazy. Totally worth digging into if you are a film lover...

I always have found it intriguing how analogue video is recorded and stored on Laser Disc system. Making some digging and research, the most accurate description of it I found is, the data surface contains bumps and holes too quite similar as CD or DVD, but instead of representing digital information, those features are meant to equal an FM signal, by reflecting laser light in a pattern created by those bumps and holes, which are arranged in such a way they are sometimes low, lower, if they are holes, high or higher if they are bumps, longer or shorter, a little sideways to left or right or skewed, as they are read by laser pick-up device at high speed, a series of variating light pulses are created and interpreted as such FM signal, containing analogue audio and video. That's a simple explanation I achieved

This weekend I watched Snow White, Speed, and Some Kind of Wonderful on laserdisc on a JVC D-series. Great format, it's an event every time. (Edit: wow I wrote this before watching the video and I see snow white and speed in your collection wow what are the odds?)

Still have ~100 LDs. The big problem is the fragility of the players. I'm on my last of four players, the Pioneer CLD-D704. All the rest have failed because of the complexity of the read mechanism and even this one occasionally will refuse to play side two. The sound is great on those discs with surround but the video quality is worse than DVD and much much worse than BluRay. Although some titles were never released on other media that number is fewer and fewer, at least ones I would care to watch.Oh yeah, the best discs are CAV where you can get true freeze frame and smooth fast forward/rewind. However they are only 30 min./side.

Thanks for your videos! Love LaserDiscs. I have a Pioneer CLD-V2600 player, which I bought for $25 CAD 6 years ago, so I could watch X Japan concerts and videos on LDs. I've since bought some other LDs, like Stephen King's The Stand ABC mini series, the Heavy Metal movie from 1981. My 55" Samsung TV doesn't have any analog inputs, so I had to buy an RCA to HDMI converter box. Works just fine. But at some point in the future, I will replace the player. It's getting old and it takes a few tries before it actually plays a disc. When I press Play, it tries to spin it up, but then spits it out.

I bought one in 1983 in the U.K. with Michael Jackson’s Thriller one of my early purchases. You never removed the disc from the hard plastic enclosure. The big negative was it was very susceptible to vibration and would jump, just like early car cd,s did.

The spin down issue (as well as spin up) on the disc is due to either a worn or dirty grip ring on the spindle platform allowing excess slippage on the disc. This is actually common on this chassis. Once cleaned or replaced, the spin up will be slightly faster and the spin down will be significantly shorter (maybe something like 5 - 10 seconds depending on the speed of the disc at the time stop is engaged). Anyway, speaking of the format in general, it was definitely awesome in its time and really was ahead of the curve on so many levels. It started out as an "all analog" system but over time incorporated CD quality PCM sound around 1984 (which meant that most discs now had two sets of stereo tracks; digital and analog). Then in 1995, it was the first format to incorporate discrete surround sound in the form of the first implementation of Dolby Digital (how many formats do you see evolve like that; it's unheard of). I still maintain a sizable LD collection including many players but I will admit I'm not using them much these days. I guess nostalgia has a way of making me keep what I probably should be getting rid of.

I love my laser discs. Wish I had a better player but nonetheless they are pretty awesome

the LaserDisc was a further development of Philips Laservision. In Europe it was called CDVideo at the beginning until the European manufacturers agreed with the Japanese to call it LaserDisc. I still a have collection of LaserDiscs/CDVideo discs but my player broke down years ago and I'm still looking out to get one again. The big discs and their covers have a collector's value like LPs. DVDs and their packaging look so cheap compared to LaserDiscs

They just didn't last very long in the popular market but people had them

Obey my command laserdisk! Obey my command!!! 👋😳🖐

They were in direct competition with RCA video discs. CED selectavision I believe they were called. Laser discs had much better picture and sound than a CED.

FAR from a failure. LD was an unmitigated success among videophiles and film collectors for 20 years+ Around SE Michigan from the early 80s through the 90s, lots of mom and pop video rental stores sold and rented LD players and discs, as well as local chains. In my working class neighborhood circa 1994, there were 2 mom and pop video rental stores within walking distance from my home with great LD selection to rent, and large vhs libraries of course. One Musicland like store was Laserland in Novi Michigan circa 1990, maybe earlier. Large store that specialized in laserdisc gear and media. Best Buy sold several LD models by the early 90s in the area, where I got my first player at the time. And it did not "fail", other than for clickbait. LD was simply replaced by the march of technology, the Dvd, then bluray. Yes, Dvd has a better picture than LD in most cases. And Dvd does support lossless pcm 2 channel sound at 16/48 up to 24/96. Many music concert dvds include a lossless 2ch pcm track, usually in addition to a 5.1 dts or Dd lossy track

Their the holy grail at thrift stores and yard sales seen fights break out as to who found first

I have the Sony MDP-605. It took time but I have the complete set of Star Trek TOS episodes on Laserdisc.

I believe that for CAV discs, you could pause and fast forward more smoothly. That's because, for CAV discs, the frame it's stored per revolution and every frame forms a ring instead of a spiral. Because of that, to pause is just a matter of staying the laser carrier on the same track to leave it paused. You can evenly see the blanking interval area at those discs. On the other hand, it's complicated to pause a CLV disc because of the nature of these discs. You have at least two frames for revolution or even more at the edges of the disc and the content it's recorded as a spiral, which it's harder for the laser assembly to just not jump to the next track.

My attitude towards Laserdisc back in the 1990s, before DVD came along, was that of it being an unrealistic format for common folk. The movies were more expensive than a drug habit.

Alas so many LDs seem to suffer from disc rot.

Was the best format prior to Blue Ray. I still have collection and one of the last Pioneer players. I wish it would have continued.

About you demo of Jurassic Park there are 2 types of disc if you have the cav version of a disc you would get a clear still of the movie when paused also a clear clean image fast forward and rewind scan and you could also watch the movie frame by frame also laserdiscs had true widescreen most DVDs didnt DVDs stretched the picture actually cutting off the the top and bottom as opposed to the sides I also found the audio better on laserdiscs especially the volume levels I never had any problems with hearing the movies volume levels were constent not like DVDs where you sometimes struggled to here certain parts of a movie

The fact is that this was the step between technology on the way to DVD. Soon in the late 90's the laser disc came out with a DVD player and then these were disappeared.

One thing i noticed about all the Laserdiscs that I own or auditioned: No "Regions/Copy Protection." If you didn't mind buying a badly mastered Hong Kong Kung Fu Laserdisc, all you had to do was "pay and ship." Most of my small collection are CLV, with one or two CAV discs, which made videocassette output look very fuzzy by comparison. It is interesting that I have "Northern Exposure" Laserdiscs that have the original soundtrack music, unlike the "generic crap" of the later, "superior" DVDs

i still watch laserdiscs, i have over 350...today i am watching Jurassic Park DTS edition and its awesome !!!

It should never take a minute for the disc to stop spinning. Also if the tray takes awhile to open you might want to clean the belt or replace the belt. I had to clean my belt on my Pioneer Elite CLD-53. Pioneer and Panasonic players I believe video quality were rated the best. I'm sure this Marantz is a Pioneer clone of something.

this one reminds me of my rca ldr 600 laserdisc player

If it were a cav disc the pause would be a still frame and the scan would be smoother.

“Late 70s technology” *shows movie from the 90s*

Back in early 2000's I bought and retrofitted AC-3 output on players and sold them and even provided AC-3 output kits for sale. I really liked Laserdisc but with DVD entering it was time to move on. Picture quality was much better on DVD and they cost less. Most often the mix on Laserdisc was the theatrical mix as opposed to a home theater mix that was made for DVD. So yes in some aspects the sound on Laserdisc was superior. I do miss my Kurtis Bahr tweaked Pioneer CLD-97 being a superb build player with the best IQ at the time.

It shouldn't take full minute to spin down, only a few seconds. Maybe the clamper is slippery (needs to replace the clamping stickers).

When you praise the good resolution, the picture shown is extremely sharpened, presumably by the monitor. Every object has inverted edges. The low capacity of the disc seems like its biggest downside. I wonder if they could up the density to the specifications comparable to the DVD. But instead of improving the resolution, up the playback time. Non-recordable optical disks have their place. You can't make as good a recording at home. One might accuse hardware manufacturers to be in collusion with movie studios, when they remove older devices from production and force us to buy movies again.

This is a Spielberg movie and these are always in 1.85 screenformat on dvd or bluray. He never used 2.35 or higher screenformats !

I would like to point out that you are using too modern TV and that is why the FF and pause may be choppy (and the pause/still image doesn't appear). I think it's because of delay that the modern TVs make with processing the signal. I had the same experience with a VCR connected to my AV receiver and displaying it on a modern TV via HDMI. I think if you use a tube TV you will have the still image while pausing and it'll be a lot smoother when you scan. Coaxial cable helps quite a bit with connecting it to a modern TV, it's not perfect, you'll still get some signal delay, but there's a chance that you will get your still/pause image (after a short delay). At least for me that worked and it also slightly improved the picture quality.

What I like about the format is how versatile it is. You can play movies, documentaries, TV shows, Karaoke, play video games (Disc and cartridge/cards), Cd's, VCD's, DVD's, HD-LD's and so much more. It was also the first home video format to have digital audio encoding like AC-3 and DTS. Anyone who has listened to DTS will know the difference. This in itself was a game changer. Unfortunately Laserdisc machines, Audio decoders and the Laserdiscs themselves were very expensive. Indeed you got what you paid for but this was at a time where not many people had a disposable income. Buying everything needed to fully use the laserdisc to it's full potential would have been ridiculously expensive. Even in todays market they are an expensive market to get into collecting for. Take the Pioneer A100 for example. The machine will cost you around $600 - $700, then you have the game and karaoke Paks at around $700 each of which there are 3 of. Just the Paks alone will cost you $2100. You can see how this adds up VERY quickly. Add in the Demodulators, DTS decoders and the rest of the audio setup and your Bank Manager will be giving you a call. My personal LD player is extremely rare. The Kenwood LD-K300V It took me 12 years to find one and cost me a LOT of money. Is it worth the money I paid? Well, it doesn't have half the features as most of the Pioneer players of the time but I needed it to complete my matching Hi-Fi stack system so considering the rarity of it then for me, YES. Do you need it, certainly not. Get a Pioneer. Now. Let's talk about the elephant in the room. Disc quality. If you are going to collect for this format, be warned. It's an absolute minefield. Don't walk into this blindfolded. Disc Rot is a huge problem to be aware of. The good quality discs are fine like Pioneer but the Sony discs are almost always expensive and heavy frisbee's. Before buying a disc. Check on LDDB (LaserDisc DataBase). They have a whole catalogue of the good, bad and ugly of laserdiscs. It's a must have for any collector but I need to tell you that if you're looking for the best picture on a modern TV this isn't it. I never saw a laserdisc or even a machine when I was growing up so just as it is today it's a VERY niche market and only for any real collector of physical media. Not many people even know about Laserdisc, even adults. It always amuses people when I put a laserdisc on because even though the format is over 30 years old it's something that not many people have ever seen in person nevermind watching a movie on LD. It's rare, it's expensive and it's awesome. Give Laserdisc some love people.

How could you not like to Collect Movies.

Given the looks of that player it is 100% manufactured by Pioneer who pretty much took over the format when Philips pulled out in the 80s. As you say it was never mass market in the way that VHS was, but it did find a huge following with home cinema enthusiasts . I disagree when you say it was unheard of in Europe as that is not true, it was popular amongst home cinema enthusiasts here too, especially in the UK. I'd be willing to bet every one who was a serious home cinema enthusiast had a laserdisc player by the mid 90s, certainly every home cinema enthusiast I have ever spoken to owned one. It was even popular enough for Philips to return to the format with their own player in the mid 90s. By then it had gained enough popularity to have discs sold alongside VHS tapes in high street record stores like HMV and Tower Records, and players were available from Pioneer, Sony and Philips here in the UK from pretty much all the major electrical retailers. I used to buy, and still own, a lot of US discs as well many UK discs. The US discs were bought from specialist import shops until the government of the time effectively banned commercial importation of non BBFC certified discs, so I instead bought US discs from Ken Cranes in California or a company based in the Channel Islands as personal imports weren't banned. It was, as you say, killed off by DVD though which was a much more convenient format and quickly became cheaper too as it became mass market.

It was still around in the 90s? I didn’t know that. I’ve heard about it only a decade ago or so.

I had a laserdisc player and a few of the movies got laser rot which was a bad point about laserdiscs, so to me it was a failure big time

The size alone for lazerdiscs are not worth it. And I thought vhs was big and bulky this is even worse lol DVDs are still king

Letterboxing is NOT cropping the image

I have a Cinderella blue ray disc movie it doesn't play at all y it is damage people are lying people now days About blue ray disc movies doesn't get scratche up not true at all

if it was a failed formant why do people make videos on it all the time

What a tedious video.

@ 7:55 you cite the most common misconception perpetrated by middle age dads of the 80s & 90s. letterbox does not crop. you are confusing it with the terrible practice of pan&scan cropping to fill crappy 3:4 television screens. letterbox maintains the exact image the director and editor created for theatrical release. it’s kinda implied by the existence of many different aspect ratios of movies like 16:9 or 1:2.2 etc. more research should have been done before putting this video out. also, laserdiscs from 1978 looked nothing like the ones in this video - those were more of a cartridge type. C-

17:00 Not true at all. 2022 was the worst pandemic year so far.

Damage blue ray disc movies doesn't play at all everything proven vhs tapes out doing y'all's video now days and people like myself are buying VCR players cleaning tapes vhs movies offline now days and people like myself are cleaning out mode switches in VCR players and fixing broken vhs tapes with Scotch tape it starts playing again with out no problem's