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

Cool, I didn't realize that. I wonder if they were NOS units from 2002, or newly imported from Japan?

 

You must have been waiting for a long time.

LD was the best home-video format for twenty years...

 

Absolutely. Just be prepared for hardcoded Japanese subtitles.

It's all that early DVNR processing. Really horrible when you see exactly what it's doing in slow motion. Like I said earlier, the Japanese Special Collection and Technidisc reissues are the exact opposite.

 

20 years, ....really? What 20 years was that exactly?

Given the TV's available back then the edge it "might" have had with the best LD had to offer was more often than not missed with the CRT's anyhow or was just a paper tiger specification game with the hard core LD guys. "I've got 2 DB better noise". Yeah, sure. And most of those LD player specs were BS anyhow.

Add to that the typical lack of quality of most of the masters of the movie releases back then and the issues with discs that were being put out , skip it all. Too much money, too little return.

Sure, ok, perhaps LD had a better picture but only with the right player, the right disc, the right master with a TV that could make use of it. all the planets had to align to really reap any benefit. Too much money, too little return again.

I've no regrets, I'm SO glad I didn't waste my money, but my friend sure did, he went into LD full force and he regrets it. I viewed it, saw the cash outlay, and walked away.

On a few occasions we compared his $$$ LD player to my Sony top of the line VHS hi fi player both into my Sony XBR 32" TV back in the day. His cost versus mine made it apparent which format was the winner. I was not going to bleed my pocket dry for an incremental, if any, improvement.

Fortunately VHS and then DVD killed it forever, and rightly so.

LD will never come back, no one will ever again make new players, no one will ever make new discs again, EVER. It is dead, other than the hanger-on's trying to make it appear as though it is a viable format in 2015.

Other than the not yet available titles to DVD/bluray, LD is an afterthought that can bring nothing to the table in 2015 other than those aforementioned titles that most folks could care less about anyhow.

But, to again answer the OP question, no it is NOT worth it, don't bother considering LD unless there are some to die for titles that you must have and simply can't get anywhere else.

 

This has been a fascinating and often volatile thread for me to read...I invested HEAVILY into the LD format beginning in June 0f 1980 until the studios stopped releasing new movies on the format about 20 years later...still have ALL of my library and 2 functional Pioneer Elite players that also double as DVD players...these days, I'd have to agree with people like Vidiot who say that getting into LD collecting NOW is a self-defeating exercise...it's a DVD/blu-ray world 15 years later and I'm FINE with that...

 

Especially considering the low cost a bluray player and many blu ray discs are now going for. Prices have tumbled.

 

Believe it or not, some people collect things for the fun of it.

 

And that's fine, just don't make claims that don't hold water.

 

I just had to see why this thread is still a thing.

 

Even though I bough most of my LD collection on the cheap, I rarely bought any DVDs due to disappointing sound quality and now I pretty much limit myself to the occasional $5 bin purchase. Okay, once a while I'll ho $10 like the Casino Royale/Quantum Of Solace twofer.

 

It's a thing because LD had such good sound quality that could distract you from iffy picture quality.

 

At this point blu rays are so cheap DVD's are hardly worth the price.

 

and I am thankful...no regrets.

 

DVDs around are going for a buck and BR $4.00 and up in the place I frequent. 4 for 1 works for me and I can deal fine with the inferior DVD...

 

Roughly 1978-1998.

Obviously, early discs were not as good as later ones. But, until DVDs surpassed LDs in the late-90's, laserdisc was the best home-video format you could get.

 

Of those of us who are still watching these, which are the titles that are still keeping us tied to the format? Anyone have anything particularly cool to share? I'm a newcomer to all this so my collection is quite a bit smaller than my "want"list but I'll share a few too

 

Yes, there is a batch of music concert titles that I will not part with.

Beatles - Let it Be - Every serious music LD collection must have this
Paul Weller - Live Wood (Japanese LD) Only issued on VHS other than the Japan issue. There was a PAL DVD
Paul Weller Movement - Brixton 1991 (Japanese LD) Only issued on VHS other than the Japan issue. No DVD
Style Council - Showbiz! (Japanese LD) Only issued on VHS other than the Japan issue. There was a PAL DVD
Yes - Live 1975 at Q.P.R. Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 (Japanese LD) later issued on a sketchy gray area DVD set mastered from the LD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes:_Live_–_1975_at_Q.P.R.
The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle - Japanese LD has a great long trailer that I am not sure has appeared elsewhere

There are more, but I'll let others chime in now.

 

No, it was not, I compared LD to VHS, side by side with my own eyes not some spec sheets, or BS reviews....and more than a few times, I was not sold on LD, best against best....sorry.

 

I don't know what the hell you were looking at, but everyone knows LDs had more detail and sharpness, at least when mastered well from good sources. Those MGM and Fox widescreen releases around 1991-93 were amazing.

 

I'd add these to the list:

The Beatles at Budokan (official Japan-only release by Apple)

The Bee Gees Live (complete Australian concert from 1989)

 

Well, if all other elements that factor into the equation are equal - and I'm talking about critical things like the original film source and the mastering - laserdisc was unquestionably superior to VHS. It wasn't even close. Laserdisc was not just a marketing gimmick. It was THE high-quality alternative to VHS. (That said, a poorly mastered LD of a poorly preserved film might very well look worse than a VHS tape. But that's obvious, right?)

 

The biggest reason I went to LD back in 1991 was that I've always disliked pan & scan of widescreen films. I want to see the entire image the director wanted audiences to see in the theater, and VHS movies were mostly pan & scan, while films on LD were offered in widescreen. Also, on my 32" Sony set LD looked much better than VHS (and VHS and LD coexisted in my home until I switched to DVD in late 1997.) The fact is that a letterbox presentation on either format loses resolution because some of the horizontal lines are used to display the black bars at the top and bottom of the picture. VHS just didn't have any to spare, whereas a letterbox LD presentation is markedly better than VHS. We had a VHS (a top of the line Hitachi Hi-Fi model) machine in our home until we got a DVR, solely to record my wife's soap opera and the odd show we were likely to miss. BTW, in my case the LD player trounced the VHS in both picture and sound quality. The sound on LD is really quite good as Humongous has pointed out several times, and if you want to see a widescreen presentation of the original Star Wars films, it's the only way you'll get them. (The bonus content of the Special Edition DVDs have them in 4:3 letterbox content, and you have to zoom the picture to see it large enough on a 16:9 monitor.) All that said, you are quite correct to tell the OP to not get into a defunct format; DVD or Blu-ray is the way to go these days, but I fear that the time of physical media is approaching its end. Streaming video has already surpassed the picture quality of DVD and it's getting close to Blu-ray (provided you have a good enough cable or satellite connection.)

Frankly, I'm quite surprised by how passionate several of the posters have been on this subject. I still have my LD collection (about 400 films in all), but I don't really watch them very often. I did watch True Lies yesterday because this thread reminded me that I haven't used my player in a while; mechanical devices need to be used occasionally to keep them operational. There will come a time that there will be no players left that will play the discs, so it is important for people who have them to transfer them to the digital domain lest they lose them forever.

 

My former boss dropped his Pioneer player and broke it during a move. He gave it to me along with close to 50 discs including tons of concerts, music video comps and the entire run of Universal Horror movies. I got his player fixed for $40.00, it's one of those that plays both sides of the disc. I already had a cheaper earlier model Pioneer, so now I have two working players and maybe 100 discs.

 

After watching the Roger Ebert bio, Life Itself, I bought a Laserdisc of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, on which he was a writer. I'm gonna watch it at least once and then frame and hang it.

 

I watched True Lies as well! Upscaled on a modern TV, the image was a step below an upscaled DVD, but the picture quality was overall pretty good. I have the DTS disc, which really shook the house. I still have my Sony Wega in the basement, but hauling it up the stairs and hooking it up takes several people. That's where the format really shines.

The movie... well, I forget that there was a time when Tom Arnold was a thing. It could have stood to have had about 45 minutes cut out.