DVD has a much higher resolution but it has digital compression artifacts. Laserdisc has a lower resolution but doesn't suffer from compression artifacts but can be grainy.
LD is the same resolution as DVD. It's a full size NTSC or PAL composite signal. The difference is storing something in composite format will detract from overall clarity and color reproduction. A DVD that's been compressed at a high bitrate with a good MPEG-2 encoder is going to blow LD out of the water any day of the week. It's not even close.
man I want to get a laserdisc player and some of the other "dead" formats like the HD-DVD player for the 360 and some movies, I showed my dad some vids about the CED stuff they did and he was kinda amazed cause he said he had never heard of or seen that stuff before.
You grew up in Seattle and went to college at ASU? Sounds like me. So I see you with your Seahawks shirt on, but who is your favorite team, Seahawks or Cardinals?
cool that you are into laserdisc just like me. I have five pioneer players and 200 movies in my shed which also contains super betamax, vhs an dvd along with my retro gaming consoles
I love laserdisc, i remember them when i was in elementary school, since then I have gotten 3 players (including a Pioneer that can freeze frame ANY movie, i guess its got a memory buffer or something) and I've got about 40 discs…..including the original pilot for Star Trek TOS with a interview with Gene Rodenberry (the Cage, with both black and white and color parts)
The Star Wars movies on one disc they speed up the film a little bit. Also one of the Star Wars cuts on Laser Disc is know as the best up of the original cut on Star Wars. You can tell if you have a good cut when Han is outside before he goes into the rebel base you will see the film movie up or down. The film was not centered right.
Laserdisc CAN look better than DVD, but there are too many variables involved including pressing quality, player quality and mastering. In almost all cases, the DVD version of something will look better and sharper. Especially when you start using component or at least s-video connections. LD essentially has a composite analog signal encoded onto it's surface. If it had each component encoded separately, it would have looked absolutely fantastic, but that was asking too much of the technology. discs would have only been able to fit about 20 minutes per side in CLV and 10 in CAV if they did that, lol. Colors are always going to be better on DVD, because composite NTSC is pretty garbage for that. I still love LD though, it's such a cool format and I've got a nice little collection myself. Lets just be realistic about it's capabilities. It's typically somewhere between VHS and DVD in picture quality, usually closer to the DVD end of that spectrum.
lol a T-pain commercial on ur channel. I was born in '89 so I had my VHS tapes growing up. But I remember when I was younger my uncle , who was always tech savvy back in the day, he had a LaserDisc player. I remember it because of the gigantic disc that it used. And the movie we watched was 'Not Without My Daughter'. Now that I think about it the movie is more of a chick flick/ lifetime type movie.
I first saw a laserdisc film really late on in the system's lifecycle.In 1998,our English Literature class had to watch a very strange modern version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream which had a sex scene in it! I remember the film quality was superior to VHS,but that's it Unfortunately,the lesson proved to be quite embarassing to for the student teacher.She had problems getting the laserdisc player to work and she had to ask us what to do,but hardly anyone had a clue what to do.
I was never into laser disk until I got a auto flip. What pisses me off is how many CAV only movies there are. They could go back and put so many movies on 1 disk 2 sided instead of 2 disk 2 sided. The disk isnt flipped in a auto flip player. The lasers on rails and it flips to the undersie of the disk.
Hell yeah you got blade runner on LD! Although I think you should have recommended it or spoke a little more about it. Easily one of my favorite films and easily one of the best sci-fi films ever.
wow I had no idea LD was thought up that early, patented in '58?? Wow...that's impressive, a lot of various things you see now are still "patent pending" but they preempted the release by 20 years!
Hey Gamester checkout LDDB there are some really GREAT sellers including G&JRarities which is where I got LOT of my collection from... Currently over 100+ Love the LDs and LDDB!
Hey there, just wondering where you got your laserdiscs? I live in NB, Canada and I don't see any in our local pawn shops. I just picked up a Pioneer CLD-1030 but no movies!
LOL! I paid more for my player's remote than the player itself... Remote was online via Pioneer @ $60! Player was (CLD-D606) $40 via local Goodwill store.
I remember going to a store in Sydney (Australia) where they imported laserdiscs from America and they had Terminator 2 LD for sale at high price of $400. Most LDs were $40 each or more. This was in 1997. My next door neighbour owned two Pioneer Laserdisc players and I would watch a few of his movies on a projected TV.
Nice collection. You got quite a lot discs i'd like to have as well ;D Oh and by the way, NTSC laserdiscs had both digital and analog sound (2 channels each) and when Dolby Digital AC3 came around, it occupied the right analog channel. PAL Discs only contained analog tracks at the beginning and from the mid 80s only digital, due to bandwich issues on PAL discs that could not handle the higher resolution PAL image and both sound tracks. CLV PAL discs could also hold uo to 65 minutes per side.
@Draknfyre you believe whatever you want. By remastering i mean (exacly like you say) cleaning up the picture to make it look better. I didn't say "remastering" is making it digital. There are dvd's out there that "look" analog because those (older) movies aren't remastered. but there still digital. The same goes for laserdisc. You can't defend that there are a bunch of 1's and 0's on the disc and clam it's analog. it's like saying red isn't red but orange.
I've never ever liked the laserdisc format. There was a reason I supported the DVD format soooo much when it got released. While DVD is far from perfect, you could easily see why laserdisc died. I preferred VHS (once Beta wasn't available) over laserdisc the entire time. While the format is nostalgic for sure... I don't think I'll ever own a player or the movies (short of someone giving them away) But this is a blast from the past for sure. Keep it up!
Oddly enough, I showed my BLADE RUNNER laser in a video the other day when I did a retroSPECT on the steelbook blu.ray of Blade Runner. It was one of 31 commentaries for my March series of retro movies. My laser is still leaning against the wall on my dresser as I type, but has a different cover from yours since it's a Criterion. Michael
I'm kinda disappointed you didn't show us any of the discs playing, though I can understand, risk of copyright strike for a video that can't really do justice to Laserdisc picture quality no matter what (analogue to digital conversion, compression by your capture device, compression AGAIN by RU-vid)
@Draknfyre Analogue medium, the picture was all analogue on all discs, Laserdisc could support digital audio as well as analogue audio. They even supported Dolby Digital, I think there were even discs out there with DTS soundtracks, before DVD started carrying DTS soundtracks
I have several LDs, but have not added to the collection since we got our first DVD player - early adopters you know! You can see my collection at my channel... I think I have them filed under LASER discs somewhere among my 1100+ videos. Michael
do you use your laser active to watch these? i have the special edition starwars trillogy not as valuable... but i have to say i can no longer watch the original trilogy any other way... it just feels right
laeerdisc's are fully digital. but thay don't have a remasterd video and/or audio so it looks anologe but in the end LD's are a bunch 1's and 0's witch (of course) is digital.
LaserDiscs were the complete opposite of practical. It could only play 30 minutes before you need to stand up and change the sides of the disc. Even on the later advanced laserdisc players that automatically switched sides it could play an hour, but you still needed to stand up at least once if you wanted to watch even a short movie. With that said, they are super cool as collectibles! If I was rich and could afford a big house, I would buy a dedicated shelf to laserdiscs and have a bunch of my favorite movies on laserdisc on display. Also, I know that some special features from some movies are only available on a laserdisc. So for hardcore collectors of movies, if they want to have all special features, they have to get a laserdisc. I can't believe how many films were released on laserdisc, some movies that have a laserdisc release weren't even released on VHS/Beta!
+Peter Loew It's true that some laserdiscs only had 30 minutes on each side, but most were extended play (60 minutes on each side). If you had a player that flipped sides automatically, you could watch a full 2 hour movie without having to get up.
+Peter Loew Not at all, NTSC Laserdisc can hold about 60min by side in CLV and 65min by side in Pal. So most movies are on just one Laserdisc and you can watch them on auto-reverse player like CLD-515 with just a 10 seconds pause, time for laser head to change of side and reverse rotation. The longer Laserdisc I have is Dangereusement vôtre (french version of A view to a kill), 128min on just one disc.
