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

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by AxC., Feb 15, 2014.

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  1. quadjoe

    quadjoe Senior Member

    Wrong. You need to use it at least once or twice a month. Lack of use is a killer for a lot of the mechanical parts in those players. It's sort of like letting a car sit unused for a long time. When you finally get it going again, you're going to have to repair some components, replace belts, or hoses and such. There are drive belts in LD players that should be exercised periodically. Other parts need to be used to stay lubricated. My Proscan LD player has a sticking drawer issue when I first turn it on, after weeks of non-use: I have to cycle the open/close cycle 2 or 3 times to open the disc tray. Once it opens, it does so reliably disc after disc, until it let it set for more than a week. I know it's going to fail eventually, but I also know that if I don't use it for a year, it'll likely never open again. What else can I do? :shrug:
     
  2. Chris Schoen

    Chris Schoen Rock 'n Roll !!!

    Location:
    Maryland, U.S.A.
    Well, perhaps I will have to play it more often then. Thanks for the heads up.
     
  3. Nice. Mine is a Pioneer DVL-700 from the late 90's and it plays DVD's as well.
     
  4. Chris Schoen

    Chris Schoen Rock 'n Roll !!!

    Location:
    Maryland, U.S.A.
    My wife's ex took the "Let It Be" laser disc with him, but left the player. I asked her, how could she let him get away with that?!
     
  5. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Yes, they do. The mechanical parts have to be lubricated, and the lube that's there will get gummy over time. The rubber parts deteriorate and fall apart. The capacitors dry out and will no longer conduct or store electricity. Dust can build up over time in the laser pickup sled, causing massive alignment problems. There's tons and tons of things that can and will go wrong with any Laserdisc, CD, or DVD player. Make copies of these things now, while you still can.
     
  6. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Quite a bit of the discussion on the various laserdisc groups I frequent is on servicing and repairing players. I'd be surprised if my own makes it to 2020...
     
  7. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    I think I have 3 old LD players but I've not touched them for YEARS. I should try to fire them up and see which - if any - still work!
     
  8. Rachael Bee

    Rachael Bee Miembra muy loca

    His Pioneer was probably an older 80's model, circa 87-91, when they first started offering LD players that played CD's. When I got my first LD player in 1986, an LD-838D, I don't think any models played CD's. Maybe the next year, the move away from LD to CLD players began. The LD player that's having problems with CD's, quit playing them. The disc clamp that's neither optimized for CD's or LD's is the problem. Pioneer got better at multi-play mechanisms gradually.

    I got my parents a CLD-990 about 1990-91. It was a cheap budget player. After about a year, it got to where it wouldn't play one side of many of the LD's they tried to watch. The shop said there was no way to adjust the laser because of cheap construction. My dad liked listening to his CD's on it and it never failed him on that account. He gave the player to a friend that needed a CD player. I found him a deal on an Elite CLD-52 that was traded in at a local dealer and he and my mom lived happily ever after.

    Most of the CLD, Pioneer models after 1992 play CD's very well. The 1995 Elite players, CLD's 99 & 79 & 59, are particularly good CD players, IMO.

    I think that all the LD players were made by Philips, Sony, Panasonic, and Pioneer. Pioneer and Panasonic provided most of the clones.
     
  9. TheLazenby

    TheLazenby Forum Resident In Memoriam

    Location:
    Pittsburgh
    Is anyone here a SelectaVision fan?

    My buddy looked into those for a while - Half Price Books usually has them in stock around here - but found it hard to find either a) a working player or b) a player that worked past one use.
     
  10. Rachael Bee

    Rachael Bee Miembra muy loca

    Trust me, you don't wanna watch movies, S-K-I-P! This is one lame format. It's generally defective. I have a friend who has, or had, beaucoups of 'em. Every time he tried playing one for me, he had several players, they skipped within about 2 minutes. This guy is a service tech and he couldn't get the players to stop skipping or all the many discs were bad. If you want dead, cheap formats, get LD or VHS. They work!
     
  11. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I worked in a big-box store in the late 1980s, and people were always coming in looking for needles for their players and they were hard to come by even then. I imagine it's near impossible these days.

    When I see a box of SelectaVision discs for sale I laugh. Unless you collect a particular title, such as Star Wars, there is little reason to buy them. There was some talk in one of the LaserDisc forums of people being successful in refurbishing old needles for a play or two.
     
  12. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
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  13. BradOlson

    BradOlson Country/Christian Music Maven

    Rachael, I know better than to look for old CED equipment and the discs. LD, VHS and Beta do work but not CED as you have mentioned.
     
  14. applecakes

    applecakes viva la vinyl

    Location:
    Toronto, ON
    If this doesn't get you excited for laserdiscs, I don't know what would.

     
    ZAck Scott and PH416156 like this.
  15. MrRom92

    MrRom92 Forum Supermodel

    Location:
    Long Island, NY
    I recently bit the bullet on a moderately priced pioneer m401 on eBay... I liked it because of the optical out, but I think I may have acted a bit too quickly without thinking. No auto flip and it seems like a very mechanically complex player, so... Not sure what to think. I'll be glad if it works.
     
  16. quadjoe

    quadjoe Senior Member

    Most LD players are fairly complex machines, and auto flip makes them more so. The biggest problem with the players is that most are now approaching 2 decades in age, and repair parts are scarce, if available at all. I have a ProScan LD player (a re-badged Pioneer) that is developing a sticky drawer: I usually have to press the button 3 times to get it to open, especially if I haven't used it for a couple of months. Once it opens, it opens with each button press throughout a viewing session. However, I know that one day, it will never open again.

    My first player was a Yamaha, that had a much better picture than the ProScan does, but it developed a stuck drawer, and they no longer made replacement parts (this was 10 years ago) even then.
     
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  17. Rachael Bee

    Rachael Bee Miembra muy loca

    Be very glad if it works. A service tech told me it and the other LD+changer model were the most troublesome models that Pioneer made. I would recommend that you never put a CD in one of it's cranky, slow changer slots.
     
    MrRom92 likes this.
  18. quadjoe

    quadjoe Senior Member

    Right. I don't dare put a CD in mine. Last time I did, I had to take the cover off to extract the CD. NOT FUN.
     
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  19. MrRom92

    MrRom92 Forum Supermodel

    Location:
    Long Island, NY

    Hmm. And here I was thinking I would stress-test the thing by letting it shuffle through a few CDs for an hour to make any potential mechanical faults apparent :doh::shake:
     
  20. Uncle Meat

    Uncle Meat Forum Resident

    Location:
    Houston, Tx, US

    I love my bluray player, it has the extra benefit in that there are Bluray Audio titles out, and the audio on the Bluray can be excellent.
    The big downside to Blurays is the price, but you can find them on sale if you look, sometimes for 5 bucks or so....
    The picture quality is excellent. I LOVED the Bluray of The Conversation.
     
  21. Uncle Meat

    Uncle Meat Forum Resident

    Location:
    Houston, Tx, US
    I don't really think of tribute bands as anything more than tribute bands.
    I got SO SICK of seeing Elvis impersonators, but I did stumble on one at a fair one time. He came out in his white jumpsuit and opened up a trailer and sang along with all these mechanical birds that were inside the trailer (very weird).
    I always wondered what he told his wife when he got home from work ("one of the robins was a little out of tune today").
    It just seems like a weird idea that you would want to pretend to be someone else, than doing your own music (but some of it is economics, they make more money that way !! not from me though ).
    It isn't that they are performing the music, it is that they are pretending to be the artist (and the crowd is pretending to, which is even weirder). I just don't get into it, rather go spend time listening to the originals or someone else.
     
  22. MrRom92

    MrRom92 Forum Supermodel

    Location:
    Long Island, NY
    I feel the same way, although sometimes the cover bands do bring something special to the experience. I once saw a decent impersonation beatles band, actually on 9/9/09, making an event of all the releases that night, so there was a nice communal feel to it. I'll never forget getting to watch fat Ringo play, and a friend ended up recognizing someone in the crowd who was popular on tv in the 90's, although the name was/is lost on me.

    Earlier this year I saw a tribute band who promised to provide a "classic 1960's liquid light show", supposedly due to be performed by one of the experts of the art form, not that this type of performance had anything to do with the Beatles or their music but where else would I be able to see something like this? Went, turns out it was just a DVD projection. Very fab.
     
    Last edited: Jul 12, 2014
  23. quadjoe

    quadjoe Senior Member

    The good news is that if it works, it will probably continue to do so for some time. My ProScan has had the sticky drawer problem for at least 5 years now, however it only sees occasional use, mostly just to keep things from freezing up from non-use. That's the real problem with a lot of these old players; they have just sat for so long that in some cases the lubricants have hardened and instead of making things operate smoothly, they just gum up the works.
     
    MrRom92 likes this.
  24. hogger_reborn

    hogger_reborn Active Member

    Location:
    Madison, WI
    DVD.

    Why not Blu Ray?
     
  25. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    The "Dark Knight" DVD was especially dire - I didn't have BD yet when it came out but still thought it looked subpar. The BD's not great, but it blows away the DVD:

    http://www.dvdmg.com/darkknight.shtml
     
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