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

I watched my Laserdisc of "Queen: The Magic Years" last night which is a three hour documentary about Queen from their inception to the end of their "Magic Tour" in 1986. It is probably the best documenter about Queen that was ever produced! I wish that it got a DVD release.

 

A somewhat exciting update on the not-so-functional m401

I disassembled the unit and had a deeper look into it. I looked at the ribbon cable that connects to the board for the front panel controls, wiggled it a bit, hit the power button and the unit instantly came to life - lights and motors of all kinds going off, disc selector rotating around, etc. tried hitting the power button to turn it off and see if I could turn it back off - button not responsive. The player was powered on but I couldn't shut it off. I unplugged the unit and tried plugging it back in - nothing again. No power. It's obviously an issue with the connection to the front panel, probably an extremely simple fix but it beats me. After all the wiggling of the clip holding in the ribbon cable, the pins snapped, so I just cut the clip and soldered the 3?leads of the cable directly to the panel - this *should* be a non issue. I may go ahead and solder all the other connections at the front panel and see if I can make it responsive again. It WANTS to turn on there's just no way of having the button pressed. I would love to bring this unit to life as I'm sure someone would like it, it deserves a better fate than being banished to the landfill.

 

Based on experience I would bet that will definitely fix it. I sell vintage coin op games and you would be surprised at how often ribbon cables fail in those. A direct connection should take care of most or all of your issues.

 

I finally picked up a player yesterday evening, from someone who offered a unit to me online. I'm having a ton of fun with it, and honestly it looks no worse than some of the older DVDs in my collection. I'm sure some of the newer DVDs with more modern authoring tools can do more with only so many lines of resolution, but for the material I'm interested in its not on DVD/blu ray anyway, so again, moot point.

It's a cld-604 which I'm told is internally identical to one of the elite models, although I believe the elite model has switchable/adjustable video filters and such. I'd be inclined to play with that if I could so I can push a little more performance out of this thing, considering it's hooked up to a 52" HDTV. I wouldn't mind some noise if it means I could get a somewhat less processed picture out of it. But as it is, still looks great.

 

The CLD-D604 is quite similar to the Elite CLD-59. Neither is a premium player.

 

Premium enough for a first time user who is not and will not be heavily invested into to the format by any means

 

I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't a suitable player for you because it isn't premium enough. I just want folks to know that the Elite CLD-59 may have great audio but PQ-wise, it's not very elite. The CLD-D703/4 models outperform the Elite 59. The 604 and 59 are both 50 db, video S/N players. For the format that's decent performance. The better players deliver 51-52+ db performance. The CLD-D504 is in essence the same player too. They all perform the same visually. They just differ in what audio features you get. Of course, you get "Carry-Oakie" with the 604.....

 

Understood. It may not be an x9 or anything but I think for the money and compared to many other players on the market it was a good find. Optical out and (a super fast) auto-flip, two huge thumbs up for me. I could do without the digital field memory but I'm not sure how or if this affects operation outside of pause; so, no biggie. 50db is better than the 48/49 spec I'm seeing on a lot of the players from the 80's/early 90's, so.. I'm happy with it. I think this unit is from 1994 or thereabouts.


One thing I'm noticing about the format on my super limited first impression is that film based material, looks decent (maybe due to telecine processes, maybe not - I'm not so knowledgable about this stuff) but material with its origins in video - well it looks really great, as good as video based material can get I suppose. Of course everything has that video "look" native to that sort of stuff but it's still clean and clear and fluid and well - dare I say it, on par with any 720 line source I've seen

 

I find this thread pretty interesting. Here is an LD transfer I have done. Because the source material is pretty great, the transfers show well. Even when output to HD, as you can see from Pink Floyd below.

Pink Floyd - Delicate Sound of Thunder

 

Here's another LD transfer form the Natalie Cole 'Unforgettable' concert.

Natalie Cole - Unforgettable

 

Also, a few months ago, I transferred the entire Billy Joel Long Island concert from Laserdisc. While only rendered in 480p, I think it looks great, considering how old the recording is.
This is the entire 1st half of the concert.

 

How did they screw up One a from the Heart? I have the Japanese laserdisc, paid $90 for it back in the mid-90's! I last saw the film 5 or 6 years ago at an Art Directors Guild event at which Production Designer Dean Tavoularis spoke afterwards. I first saw it at it's Radio City Music Hall premiere, loved it since then.

 

It's heartbreaking. You know how the film starts, and the whole first reel doesn't have one single cut? How it flows from moving over the dunes, through the Golden Nugget sign, down onto the street, over cars, up to the window Frannie is working in, through the window, following Frannie talking to her friend, then looking into a mirror, and how the image in the mirror changes to Hank looking into a mirror, talking to his friend?

That whole genius flow got broken up with a scene of Frannie buying tickets. Vickie and I know the film so well from the VHS and Laserdisc that when we saw that in the theater when it was shown at the Music Box theater, that I was convinced that they had swapped a reel. There are other scenes inserted, and they broke up the musical flow. I haven't been able to bring myself to watch both closely to spot all the changes, but it felt like butchery.

I would have loved to have seen the Radio City Music Hall premiere.

 

Thanks for that info, I always meant to pick up the DVD but never got around to it, just the CD reissue. The soundtrack is one of my all time favorites, the vinyl has gotten much play since it's release, and I bought a reissue a few years ago that sounds slightly better. I recently saw that MoFi announced a reissue, definitely looking forward to seeing what they do with it. I have a wonderful souvenir of the film, a small gouache preliminary painting of the backing used in the junk yard set. I picked it up for only $100 on Ebay from Profiles in History the Beverly Hills Auction House. There's also a wonderful lobby card set available if you look.

 

Yeah, the DVD was like running into that girl you used to lust after in high school at your 30th reunion, and she's had all sorts of "work" done...

 

A fascinating thread as I sit here in the middle of the night with my five year old while she watches "My Little Pony" (the perils of kids falling asleep to early without dinner!). Right behind me are a five foot length of LDs. I started renting and then collecting them in 1993, I lived just a few blocks away from Dave's Video The Laser Place in Studio City, L.A. so it was very easy to rent from their huge library. It's easy for many to forget, but this format was the best thing out there for many years and by it's end the quality had gotten quite good. While I no longer have my standard 1:33:1 CRT TVs I do have a Samsung 30" CRT HD TV on which the LDs still look pretty good (if they were well done in the first place). While I rarely if ever purchase any LDs, I did recently buy Van Morrison's "The Concert" a 1989 show that I attended at the Beacon Theater in New York City. How great it was to see an old memory come back to life!

 

I have lots of good memories of shopping for LDs at Videophile in Seattle. I miss the days of having a store dedicated to quality media and being able to discuss with the other people the different titles the quality of the transfer. It was always exciting when the new releases came in.

 

The director got what he asked for. Directors sometimes make "unusual" creative choices, and Coppola is no exception. Everything you see is what he supervised and specifically approved.

 

That's as may be, but it looked like Coppola took the criticism to heart, and re-edited the movie trying to please a bunch of people who are never going to like this film. He should have released the same edit that those of us who love it enjoy, and hang the rest. Instead, we have a great looking DVD that we'll never play, and the critical revaluation he was apparenty seeking never happened.

This film just doesn't work for anyone who doesn't pay close attention to lyrics. Tom Wait's music carries half the plot, and that gets sacrificed to the more explicit plot happening visually.

The DVD is like Jennifer Grey's new nose, and pleases nobody.

 

I'd put Holly Hunter's replacement nose up against Jennifer's any day of the week.

 

Your response is very incorrect. The resolution of a laserdisc is 425-450 lines. That is twice as much as a VHS tape (240 lines). And yes, an SVHS tape was almost twice as good as a VHS picture. Since a standard DVD resolution was about 480 lines, a laserdisc picture was not that far off resolution wise from a DVD. While a laserdisc can't approach an upscaled DVD or a Blu Ray, anyone who simply threw away thousands of dollars of laserdiscs as "junk" simply doesn't have a clue.

There are myriad reasons to still own a laserdisc player. One, there are still hundreds of titles of movies and concerts released on laserdisc, especially in Japan, that have NEVER made it to DVD. Two, many many concert laserdiscs, due to rights issues, will NEVER see the light of day on DVD or even blu ray. Three, concert music laserdiscs have UNCOMPRESSED PCM STEREO soundtracks, which is the purest and best way to hear music, as opposed to COMPRESSED crappy Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtracks on DVDs, which are complete and utter JUNK, to use your word. So ironically, if you threw away bunches of music concert laserdiscs thinking they were "junk" in order to 'upgrade' to crappy DD 2.0 DVDs, you DOWNGRADED your collection.

Basically, you digitized your brain and bought into the DVD hype. The clean analog picture of a well made laserdisc is still a very pleasing and accurate picture on a nice CRT and even some good HDTVs which display analog sources well. I have enjoyed watching things like the original (and still unreleased on DVD) untampered with Star Wars Trilogy and hundreds and hundreds of unreleased on DVD movies and concerts on laserdisc for 30 years on laserdisc, and my LD players are still going strong. The best Pioneer Elites were built like tanks, and still run great, unlike cheap crappy DVD players which are designed to last a few years and then break.

So while I would not spend an arm and a leg on a laserdisc player and discs now, if someone is looking for some very specific things on LD that they cannot get on DVD, there are very good reasons to own a laserdisc player. Hopefully the original poster of this thread didn't follow your advice, which was uninformed "junk".

 

Since Lucas refuses to release the original untampered with Star Wars trilogy on DVD and Blu Ray, and never will, you are correct. They did release the untampered with original releases on the first DVD special edition sets as bonus DVDs, but they were not anamorphic widescreen and were actually just copies of the laserdiscs. So the best way to watch the original Star Wars Trilogy is STILL the Definitive Edition Box Set or the "Faces" releases of the first three movies on LD (the last LD releases). For those that threw their laserdiscs away as "junk" back when DVDs came out, that has to hurt........

 

See my response above. A lot of misinformation is contained in this thread by those that don't know anything about laserdiscs.

 

Exactly. There is another thread here about music concerts laserdiscs that have never been released on DVD or Blu Ray, and probably never will due to rights issues or marketing, which is why I signed up here to chime in. I have dozens and dozens of music concert laserdiscs that have never made it to DVD and have re-started my "transfer these to DVD" project which I have stopped and started many times over the years. I am going to list a bunch that I have in that other thread. Some have been mentioned here. Stuff like Neil Young-WELD, Tom Petty-Take the Highway Live, The Band Live in Japan, The Band is Back, Blood Sweat @ Tears in Little Club, Elton John in Central Park, Pink Floyd Delicate Sound of Thunder etc etc. I just got done transferring the pristine laserdisc concerts of Berlin--Live in Japan, The Cars Live (Summit, Houston 1984), Cheap Trick Live at the Chicago Navy Pier 1981, Sheila E 1600 Romance, The Police Invisible Sun Tour 1982. I have dozens and dozens more. Couldn't do without my laserdiscs and a DVD recorder (capturing that uncompressed PCM sound).