Are laserdiscs worth getting or am I better off with DVDs?

I've been going through my backlog of unwatched discs lately and occasionally I'll find a gem like this one. Unfortunately, it only has an analog audio track, but many of the videos are ones I haven't seen... and I watched a lot of MTV back in 1985 when this one came out.

 

At East Tennessee Ford where I sold, there were about a half dozen 36" TV's spread around the large showroom all showing Ford vehicles, "all day and all of the night".... The first day I was there I thought to myself those cars look so good, it's got to be LD powered. I walked over to one of the solid oak cabinets and read the word Pioneer on the front of the player.

Most people are unaware of most of the commercial LD applications. Real Estate info and pictures have been kept on CAV frames. My dad was a pathologist. He had the Pioneer salesperson visit him and try to sell his lab an LD library of cell images on CAV frames. I didn't see the player but he had brochures that Pioneer left. He had an LD player at home, BTW. He and mom followed my lead. He didn't buy it for the lab. He said the hospital had sufficient images archived. He thought some smaller labs without resources might like the system. When Whittles Communications was running their health TV shows in doctor's offices. That was LD's. They got a new one every month. I looked inside the cabinet at my doctor's office. There sat a Sony MD-333 player. The very player I once had that dug a canal in an X-Files disc when the main board went out allowing the reader to go k-razy and dig, literally.

The University of Tennessee Library, for many years, bought 2 copies of every, non-porno, movie that came out on LD. I took a few evening courses during the 80's and that allowed me access to the LD's. My dad was teaching a course at U.T. from the late 80's till about '95. He had access. All I had to do was give him my shopping list. They even had LD players you could check out. I got amused several times when folks ahead of me were miffed that they had to lug home this LD player to watch their chosen movies, all for F-R-E-E! I know they made tapes of some LD's but many films were only on LD.

 

Is the original cut on the Criterion blu-ray?

 

Wow, that actually sounds really awesome. I could learn a lot from a disc like that. Hopefully I can be equally as lucky!

 

Are you referring to the Healthlink discs? Technically my first LD - wasn't quite sure what it was at first, I figured it was some educational video or from a medical journal or something. I had it for a few years before I even had a player - I just bought it because I figured it might be of some use as a cartridge setup tool due to the mirrored surface! Needless to say it didn't quite get the care any LD probably should, but I tried it anyway and turns out it plays perfectly fine. I think I have April 1990. I tried entering it on LDDB but no apparently no submission exists for it.

For a long while it was actually the only disc I've ever seen "in the wild" - it was just mixed in with LPs. Discs or players seemingly never turn up anywhere around here. One record store by me sometimes has a small stack of movies but never anything really worth buying.

 

I'd like to get this issue of the Wall LD, just to rip the Alan Parker commentary to another format.

Btw, I do have the good wide screen one with great sound.

 

I wonder if this version of Pompeii would have the theatrical 4-Channel quad mix in DD on it?

I have this LD myself, but never tried decoding the soundtrack. I heard that the later DVD called "director's cut" is masked to look like wide-screen. Big bummer. But at least this version looks good.

 

This looks pretty bad on the DVD I saw. LD must be the way to go for picture and sound on this title.

 

Presumably the check-out players were relatively lightweight like Pioneer CLD-5xx or 6xx models, and not serious hernia-inducers like the Elites. Having access to a library with a huge selection of LDs like that, all at no cost, had to have been pretty sweet.

One of the things that first got me into LDs was that they were the best way (outside of infrequent theatrical screenings) to see Hong Kong films when the HK film industry was in the full flower of its renaissance during the 1990s. The only other option was usually multi-generation VHS dubs of widely varying quality that often originated from LDs. Houston has a huge Chinatown, and at that time had several Asian video stores that rented laserdiscs, one in particular which had almost every HK film you were likely to have heard of. When DVD started to gain a foothold, most of those stores migrated to that format and eventually sold off their LDs, although LDs still hung on for quite a bit longer than they did in western video stores. All of those stores are long gone now, ultimately succumbing to the same economic and cultural forces that have shuttered countless other once-thriving video stores.

 

I was thinking about trying to open a LD rental store, seriously thinking about getting loans and going for it. This was 1990 - 91, and it looked lot like LD was the future, with more and more deluxe big boxes with the works included.

Then a store opened up on Melrose near the corner of Fairfax. It was cramped and I could tell struggling, and then it was gone within just a few months. That told me that even in the peak years, you needed more than laser to survive in retail.

 

I believe that this is just a stereo soundtrack. There have been quite a few complaints because the DVD has added footage and is cropped to simulate widescreen. This is the only place to get the complete theatrical version.

 

I'm not aware of the Criterion.

 

I rented LDs in the late 80's when I had my record store. I was in CA, a relatively big market, but rarely rented one. I haven't a clue how you could make money doing that. I don't think you could have even rented a disc out enough to come close to recouping the disc cost, never mind paying the rent. In hindsight, the record business wasn't much better. I now consider it a blessing that I closed after around three years. Cds came around and made my vinyl inventory newrly worthless, and better financed CD only stores started popping up and that was the end for me! Still, it was fun doing it and I loved shopping for laserdiscs back in the day. Still have around fifty, mainly music titles never released on DVD. Have two players inc a Denon flipper, which was supposed to be the best sounding and I assume is rare as it was ridiculously expensive. Don't even know if it works....haven't had it on in ten years or more.

 

Gotcha. I think it is only part of a box set called America Lost and Found: The BBS Story which contains Head / Easy Rider / Five Easy Pieces / Drive, He Said / The Last Picture Show / The King of Marvin Gardens / A Safe Place. Based on Amazon reviews, it might be the director's cut, but only one review I saw actually claimed that. The Amazon info didn't mention it.

* Answered my own question. From Criterion's website:

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer of Peter Bogdanovich’s director’s cut, supervised by Bogdanovich, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition

I've only seen the film once, on cable, so I'm not even sure which cut I've seen.

 

I first saw a player in my dentists office as a kid and was fascinated at the motion control it had. Then I later saw them occasionally in the back of classrooms or school storage closets.

Don't hate me. One of my best ever bin finds was a mint in shrink DTS copy of The Shadow. $1.99. I first saw the movie on this and have since seen it half a dozen times, and become a major fan. It appears that some were ported to DTS DVD with even higher bitrate full DTS tracks before it was mandated to reduce the tracks down to 755 kbp/s.

BTW guys if you can find a demodulator for ac-3 it is totally worth it. I have a dozen or so discs with DD 5.1 and all of them are extremely impressive. I fired up True Lies last night despite knowing the DTS and DVD are superior (some have found the Dolby track was slightly remixed for LD and the other two were right off the theatrical master), and even that was very hot and punchy. The Star Wars SE remixes come off really well like they did in the theater. Goldeneye has that really hot LFE also on the first DVD. But the winner has got to be Mission Impossible which alone makes both the DVD and Blu-ray worthless.
I have found both a Sony edp-800 and Yamaha DDP-1 used locally for nothing.

 

So this is the edited version, but with additional scenes. No doubt to help give this a bit less of a shock to school teachers showing this to students. Too bad, as one scene really surprised me, and made the point much more, er, pointed.

 

BTW, the DTS True Lies LD isn't very common while the standard DD LD is common.

 

BTW, there are many childrens movies that are widescreen on LD that are P&S on most DVD issues but the widescreen is available on R2 and R4 DVDs including An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.

 

FYI True Lies and The Abyss are both on deck for Blu-ray releases.

 

Wow, I wasn't aware that the "director's cut" had material removed as well as added. I have the Criterion CAV LD and the America: Lost and Found Blu-ray box, and the added scenes are all that's mentioned as far as changes.

So is the old Columbia Tristar LD the only way (besides the VHS) to see the pre-director's cut version now?

 

This wiki entry indicates that the Director's Cut really just restores the intended version, which was cut to fit a studio mandated running time:

In 1992, Bogdanovich re-edited the film to create a "director's cut". This version restores seven minutes of footage that Bogdanovich trimmed from the 1971 release because Columbia imposed a firm 119-minute time limit on the film.[3] With this requirement removed in the 1990s, Bogdanovich used the 127-minute cut on laserdisc, VHS and DVD releases. The original 1971 cut is not currently available on home video, though it was released on VHS and laserdisc through Columbia Tristar home video.

I wonder if the "pointed" point you refer to is not removed entirely but cropped for widescreen release, whereas what you had seen previously had been an open matte full screen video? Just a point I saw someone make on another forum.

 

A Goofy Movie is a big one, pan & scan only on DVD. Can't wait to find this one and see it again.

 

This is another title that the widescreen on DVD is only on R2 and R4 DVDs

The LD: http://www.amazon.com/A-Goofy-Movie-Laserdisc/dp/B000006III/

 

Goofy Movie LD: http://www.amazon.com/A-Goofy-Movie-Laserdisc/dp/B000006III/

 

You are correct, sir. It was cropped. But not because of the widescreen release.