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. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member


    That is a great laserdisc concert not available on DVD. I have both the domestic and Japan import version. Those Japanese releases seemed to be pressed better in many cases and have less LD rot issues. One of the best Joel concerts from the prime of his career with a killer song selection.
     
  2. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member


    If you are planning on getting into laserdiscs a bit for the never released stuff, that is a decent player. If you can find a reasonably priced Pioneer 704 or Elite 79, or better yet an Elite 97 or 99, those are the way to go, short of the true High End Japanese players or a Runco. I have two working Elite 97s and Elite 99s which are still going strong, as well as a few others I picked up when people started dumping their players cheap back in the early 2000s.
     
  3. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member

    and those aren't any better than the Laserdisc releases, since they ARE the laserdisc releases, simply ported over. They are not anamorphic widescreen, and the sound is superior on the laserdisc, and I think the LD still look better, so his statement still stands as true.
     
  4. quadjoe

    quadjoe Senior Member

    The Star Wars films are the biggest reason I've kept my LD player and discs. I do have the first DVD SE sets, and in order to view the "bonus" theatrical originals on my 60" plasma set, I have to zoom them up. That said, my ProScan player isn't a good match for the plasma set, and LD films only look so-so on it, and it's developing a sticky drawer, so I know it will fail eventually :( . At this point, I'm not sure if I'll try to get another player or not.
     
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  5. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member

    As someone said, you don't rip a laserdisc, they are ANALOG video sources. All you have to do is get a DVD recorder and RECORD the LD to DVD, just like you would a VHS tape to DVD. Many people don't understand that Laserdiscs were Analog pictures with Digital SOUND.
     
  6. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member


    I have a DVD copy from Laserdisc and it looks great. Its not like the original film was pristine looking. If you have a rot free LD source, it should look great.
     
  7. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member


    that is good to know if I ever have to use CrotchDog in a sentence
     
  8. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member

    Let me know when the original Star Wars Trilogy makes it to Blu Ray. Or Neil Young's Weld. Or Pink Floyd's Delicate Sound of Thunder. Or Tom Petty's Take the Highway Live. Or the entire Princes Trust Rock Concert Collection. Or.........etc etc etc
     
  9. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Actually, we measured the actual resolution for all the formats when I was co-technical editor at Video Review magazine in the 1980s. VHS actually came out to about 160 lines (2MHz), measured flat, assuming 80 lines per MHz. S-VHS was maybe 200 lines (2.5MHz) at best. Laserdisc was around 240 lines (3MHz), depending on the source and the test disc being used. But in the 1990s, DVD was razor-flat all the way out to 5MHz, which was at the time the limits of our analog composite test gear.

    The big problem with laserdisc was always noise and the fact that it was still an analog, color-under composite format, meaning that the chroma was carried on a subcarrier at a much lower frequency. This meant the chroma signal was noisier and softer than the luminance signal. In effect, Laserdiscs were just as noisy as VHS. My memory is that the S/N ratio was maybe 48dB on a good day; with DVD, the S/N was at least 10dB higher, roughly 55dB-58dB, which is a huge increase. Again, the main limiting factors will be the source materials and the mastering.

    My opinion is, given identical sources, the DVD will always look better provided the compression isn't too bad -- say, 6 or 7 Mbps or higher.

    "Never" is a long time, and Lucas no longer gets to make that decision. I suspect since Disney has owned Lucasfim for the last 2 years, they will make plans to eventually reissue all the Star Wars films as they were originally released. I don't think George Lucas cares or will be involved at that point, except maybe to approve or disapprove the color and mix. Fox has the home video rights to Star Wars and Empire for the next few years, but I'm not so sure about the other films; I think you could make a good argument that Fox and Disney could cooperate on a combined remastering/re-release schedule prior to the release of The Force Awakens in December. If not then, it'll eventually happen.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2015
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  10. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member


    What you should have said is that the music PCM soundtracks on laserdiscs, which are UNCOMPRESSED, blow away the much compromised and crappy Dolby Digital 2.0 and even 5.1 soundtracks on DVDs But you probably didn't realize that.
     
  11. Rachael Bee

    Rachael Bee Miembra muy loca

    It Came From Hollywood is an LD I continue to watch every year or two. Apparently, it's never gonna come out on advanced formats. I actually have it out for a go presently. My Ruggles Of Red Gap LD looks better than the disappointing DVD that came out a few years back. It's also pulled for a go. My LD players need the dust blow out. I don't use 'em like I used to.... so many discs, so little time....
     
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  12. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member

    I don't understand how that can be, since I have read plenty of articles that the best laserdisc players displayed up to 450 lines from a well mastered laserdisc. Laserdisc players were in their infancy in the early 80s, the players I use were manufactured in the early to mid 90s. So maybe technology advanced after your tests. Your numbers simply don't sound correct. And I will rely on the eye test also, since VHS was clearly inferior visually to a well produced laserdisc, and much much noisier. I have been transferring both tape and LD sources to DVDs for decades and anyone can plainly see that laserdisc is far superior and far less noisy. The best laserdisc transfers certainly are of DVD quality, and I have found some that look better.

    As far as Star Wars, I wouldn't hold my breath. I bet Lucas puts in his will that those things can't be released. At any rate, I have been watching the best and original Star Wars releases on Laserdisc for over 20 years, while the DVD crowd still waits. That alone makes it worthwile to own a laserdisc player.
     
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  13. Rachael Bee

    Rachael Bee Miembra muy loca

    There are Academy Ratio films that looker better on LD despite all that you cite. The DVD counterparts are so compressed. It helps if the movie is in B & W too, like so many of 'em are. I have the advantage of having an HLD-X9 to play my LD's on. That's enough to tip the scales on some discs.
     
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  14. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    The articles you read were wrong and misinterpreted what frequency response is. When we questioned Pioneer's people on this -- and I also had the grand tour of the Pioneer pressing plant in Carson, CA (right next to an oil refinery, which is not the best place to put a disc-pressing plant with multiple clean-room environments) -- they kind of hemmed and hawed and basically said, "well, we measure resolution at the -12dB point, so even though the signal is very rolled off at that point, technically it sort of measures 450 lines if you go with this definition." But measured flat, it's wrong. I would argue that by the time it's rolled off by -12dB, the resolution spec is meaningless.

    Note that in the actual printed spec sheets, they never ever qualified how these numbers were measured, and how they were interpreted. It's kind of like when you buy a pair of speakers and they specs say "frequency response 20Hz-20,000Hz." But what does that mean? If the highs are down -12dB, there are almost no highs there. Video is very similar in that regard. If the frequency response is not flat -- sound or picture -- then you're losing something.

    We actually were in touch with the FTC and the EIA to see if they could come up with a meaningful way of expressing resolution, but because the various electronics companies were so fiercely competitive and not cooperative, the spokesman I dealt with eventually threw in the towel and said it wasn't going to happen. Even something as basic as MPG ratings on cars took decades to implement, and that was something that really affected the economy and people's budgets. Something as trivial as resolution specs were mighty low on the FTC's list of priorities.

    Again, he no longer owns the rights to the movies and has no say in how they're released. In fact, Lucas had no say in the forthcoming Episode 7, and has already said although he had written a preliminary script for it, J.J. Abrams threw it out and started from scratch. It's a while new ballgame. Many industry sources have said over the last year or so that Disney intends to capitalize on their $4 billion investment in Lucasfilm to the hilt, including theme parks, sequels, reissues, and very well will include remastered versions of the original theatrical versions. I would bet, though, that they will compromise by making you buy both versions of the movie: in the case of Star Wars, the original 1977 film, plus the revised 2004 version (which is just fixes applied to the 1999 redo).
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2015
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  15. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    It's all about the mastering. If the Laserdisc and DVD (or even Blu-ray) weren't made from the exact same transfer, then it's not a fair comparison. This is very much the same argument as CD vs. LP.
     
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  16. quicksrt

    quicksrt Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Not a perfect analogy because CDs do not have the frequency response of LPs. We know that, and we know why 24/96 was invented. The LP will blow the CD out of the water when tapes are exact for both formats. LPs can carry the "CD-4 quad" signal, we know that CDs cannot reach that high a frequency.

    The DVD is going to win over LD, and the LD is handsomely prefered for quality over VHS when from same sources.
    Not sure why you think LD is just as noisy as LD, but that's another post. My LDs have less noise than my VHS tapes are a rule.
     
  17. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Again, it depends on the mastering. If you look at full-field color test signals, you'll see what I mean. Full-field magenta or red are absolute killers. Not so bad in DVD. Awful in VHS and Laserdisc. The Pioneer engineers in Tokyo and LA admitted to me (with some duress) that they kind of "averaged" the estimated S/N specs in their brochures by looking at a broad spectrum of test signals, but absolutely admitted that the full-field magenta patterns were like 10dB worse than the printed spec. And it also depended heavily on how good or bad the laserdisc pressing was.

    It's possible that on the best LD players, they were able to improve the S/N ratio with noise reduction, but there's always a price to pay for that. I remember very well with the LD-S1 in the 1980s, and you couldn't turn the NR off; with the later LD-S2, they gave you an off switch plus two different levels (low and high) for noise reduction, and it helped the noise level quite a bit... but at the expense of frequency response.

    The tradeoffs between S/N ratio and frequency response have always existed with analogue formats, and I think it'll continue to be a factor. The more high frequencies you have, the more noise you generally run into. My joke is that when we first started to transfer film to HD, nobody could believe how much grainier the film looked in HD, because suddenly you could resolve all that grain into the picture. The SD picture rolled it all off to the point where nothing was there anymore, making the picture "seem" better.

    To backtrack: the biggest single problem I can see with anybody trying to play laserdiscs today -- as I said much earlier in this thread -- is trying to find working players in a world where Pioneer bailed on making parts for most of these machines a long time ago. I don't think it's worth the trouble except in the very rare cases where a given title (like Compleat Beatles or Let It Be, mentioned elsewhere) was never reissued in any other format. But even in those cases, I think it's very wise in 2015 to transfer the LD to a very low-compression video file on hard drive, to prepare for the day when the player's going to break.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2015
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  18. MrRom92

    MrRom92 Forum Supermodel

    Location:
    Long Island, NY

    Over the past 2 months I've been slowly making my way through a 5 disc WB animation boxset and having a blast :) they look decent. But with that said, the shorts duplicated on the platinum collection blu-rays simply do not compare... Those look astoundingly good. I've read that the LDs were sourced from 16mm prints while the original camera negatives were used for the blu-ray transfers, so I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. I hope the volumes continue so the material currently only on the laserdiscs can look equally as good.



    Anyhow, I have two things that I may be completely off on, but if anyone would know if these are misconceptions, it would be you. Just out of curiosity on these things.

    1. Is it true that CAV discs are actually of a higher resolution than CLV discs, and are at a higher resolution at the outer edge of the disc than at the start? (similar to LPs)
    Did professional use test discs take this into account?

    2. While the picture is of course stored as fm analog composite video, is it not true that most later players employ some form of (conversion then) digital processing, and then convert back to analog at the output, and we are actually *not* seeing a true analog image, especially after the tv and any other equipment has its way with things?
     
  19. quadjoe

    quadjoe Senior Member

    I didn't say that because my point was simply that the analog sound tracks are noisy. Not on every disc to be sure, but my copy of The Wizard of Oz has so much noise on the analog (mono) sound tracks as to be unlistenable, at least to me. I do realize that the DD sound on DVDs is compressed, but that wasn't the point of the statement.
     
  20. quadjoe

    quadjoe Senior Member

    The first LaserDiscs (ca. 1978) did not have digital sound. Digital audio was added to the LD format in 1985. I actually saw a LaserDisc player in 1978 and remember being very impressed with both the picture and the sound, it was so much better than the BetaMax machine the store also had on display. The LD was being demoed on an Advent projection TV in a darkened room, and I thought it was great to have stereo sound with the video image. (BTW, the Beta machine was one of the Sony units that came built into a console with a 23" Trinitron TV.) The thing that was off-putting for me about LD at that time was the $1,200 price tag for the player. I didn't get a LD player until early 1991 (a Yamaha CDV-1600, a great player for both LDs and CDs) and it looked great on our 32" Sony TV. I have only two movies on LD that pre-date the 1985 introduction of digital sound: Bye, Bye Birdie and Tootsie. Their sound is just okay; there is a fair amount of hiss (in spite of the CX noise reduction, which makes little, if any improvement) and a "scratchy" quality. Perhaps the transfers were made with a poor copy (sound-wise) of the films. The picture on the other hand, looks pretty good, though not on my 60" plasma set: it just blows up all of the flaws.
     
  21. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Most of the early transfers I've seen on LD are pretty bad, though they were probably considered spectacular for the time. I've got a fair sized collection of the DiscoVision discs, and issues abound. The early players had to be hooked up to a TV using an adapters that went into the antenna input, though I do remember that one of the big selling points was that you no longer had to deal with broadcast noise and snow and instead had a known source coming into your TV set. We didn't get our first VCR until 1984, but had known about LD and how great the picture was since the late 70s. Of course, the price was way out of our range.

    I'll still go through collections when they show up at Half Priced Books and cherry-pick the concert titles, animation, and older 4:3 films as long as the prices are reasonable (i.e. under $3). Unfortunately, many are still priced like it's 1998.
     
  22. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member

    LMAO. First of all, anyone who is not blind can tell that a good LD picture is nowhere near as noisy as a VHS source. You don't have to be a PhD or have worked for a Video Magazine to see that. Its patently absurd to claim that a VHS picture is just as noisy as a LD. Second, no one here is claiming that Laserdiscs produce a better picture than Blu Ray. So its absurd to compare the two---no one is debating that. My first post here about laserdiscs was correcting the patently incorrect statement that a laserdisc source was no better than a VHS source. That is simply wrong, I don't care what magazines you worked for. Third, MOST laserdiscs have DIGITAL sound and are much better sounding than the standard DVD, which have COMPRESSED digital tracks. Yes, early on laserdiscs were produced with analog sound. By far the majority of laserdiscs have digital sound and concert laserdiscs with UNCOMPRESSED PCM soundtracks are going to sound better on a good stereo system than DVDs with crappy COMPRESSED dolby digital tracks. Fourth, no one ever claimed that the very first laserdiscs, like those Discovision discs, were great laserdiscs without issues. Most of us with good laserdisc collections have top end laserdisc players built in the early to mid 90s at the height of laserdisc production and have collections that go beyond a few crappy Discovision discs. Finally, no one is claiming that you should shell out thousands of dollars now on a laserdisc setup. The question posed was whether its still worth it to pick up a laserdisc player. Dumbbells that responded that all laserdiscs are junk and no better than VHS are simply wrong, and don't get it. And to act like it was a silly niche format that lasted a blink of an eye is wrong too. It was THE preeminent video source for movies and concerts for 20 years in terms of quality, and even after DVDs came out, there were myriads of reasons for their superiority over DVDs, especially in the music concert realm, and there are many reasons people hang on to their laserdisc players and collections now. In fact, many early DVD transfers, especially concerts, came from crappy VHS sources believe it or not, and looked no better, and never sounded better than laserdiscs.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2015
  23. TheHumungous

    TheHumungous Active Member


    I think you meant to say "not sure why you think LD is just as noisy as VHS", and I agree. It doesn't take an array of technical instruments to look at a picture and see which one looks better in the vast majority of cases. As far as DVD and LD, most of my friends can't tell the difference between a DVD and a good laserdisc picture in fact, and are blown away when I tell them its a laserdisc playing. What DVD gained in being "less noisy" they lost in obvious and very distracting compression artifacts which are inherent in any compressed source.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2015
  24. 5th-beatle

    5th-beatle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brazil
    Has anyone mentioned that scene from Back To The Future II? A bunch of laserdiscs dumped in an alley in 2015.
     
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  25. PNeski@aol.com

    [email protected] Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York
    for out of print not on dvd music titles ,laser disc is worth having ,for watching movies non 16x9 its pretty much useless ,unless its some rare title I always thought Lasers were better than Tape
     
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