I think this is a G.Q. I’m searching for a store in New York City that has a good selection of used Laser Disk movies for sale. Yep, the old twelve inch ones.
Anyone have any thoughts? Internet sources are possible, but my friend would LOVE to be able to walk in and see them for himself. ( It’s always for a friend, isn’t it?? I feel like I’m buying my first Trojans 
)
Thanks in advance for the assistance,
Cartooniverse
I have no knowledge of the way things are in NYC, but I’ll make a few general comments anyway.
I still own and love LaserDiscs. But DVD’s have killed them. Here in the DC area, I knew several stores where I could go in and see LD’s. Now I know none. I would suspect that this is the situation in NYC as well.
Even most of the internet sites have closed down. Very few new LD’s are being made. But there are some being made in Japan. And as an interesting development, I have recently acquired a bootleg LD of Beatle concerts.
I would not recommend that anyone start a collection of LD’s at this point. But those of us already in can collect more used LD’s rather cheaply. Most LD’s that I have bought in the past year were from ebay (and that includes that Beatles bootleg).
LD’s are cool to look at, I guess. But if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Your “friend” must actually want to look at the covers. As with the old LP records, the covers on LD’s are often very cool indeed. On EBAY, there are often pictures with the listing that show the artwork.
I’ll second Perderabo’s take on this.
My father is/was a huge fan of the laserdisk. He built his whole system around it. Hell, he built a whole room devoted to the LD.
Needless to say, he was devastated when the DVD’s came out. It completely whiped out the LD market almost overnight.
My fathers dissapointment, if I can speculate here, had more to do with the loss of where he got his LD’s, not necessarily because the LD was displaced by the DVD.
That is, all the mom and pop stores, the internet sites, and other avenues he used to get LD’s from, where now gone. I think he felt bad for those folks and disliked the idea of starting from scratch again. The “Going against the grain for the sake of a great product” mentality was lost as well.
Anyrate, he’s adjusted and the people who used to sell LD’s have adjusted too- they simply switched over to DVD’s.
From what I can gather that my pop says, LD’s are nearly impossible to find these days. An online auction site is about your best bet. Maybe even a garage sale in a more upscale neighborhood might work, I don’t know.
All I do know is that the LD market has been destroyed by the DVD. And it happened damn fast, for better or worse.
If, hypothetically speaking, I had a roomful of videodisks and a DVD-Recordable burner–
I don’t suppose it would be a simple matter of copying the digital file from source to destination, huh?
Exists there a drive that is computer-compatible that will read videodisk data? A “videodisk-ROM” drive?
Is the format used on a videodisk binary-compatible with the format used on a DVD? (My guess would be ‘no’).
If not, is there, in existence, a software package that will convert from one format to the other, much like converting between audio CD track format and AIFF or WAV? If so, do any mainstream (read: affordable for home use) video digitizing / video editing software packages include this capability?
I only ask out of random curiosity. I do not have a roomful of videodisks.
I have a DVD player and am quite pleased with it but I am curiosity how do/did Laserdisks stack up to DVDs quality wise?
Ahunter3, I have never seen a twelve inch disk drive for a computer. And I don’t think the players had any kind of data port.
My dad got a player when they came out, it came with 2 disks. The Princess Bride, and E.T. It was a lot better than VHS, and somewhat better than our Sony Beta-max. I have enver seen a DVD except on a computer so I couldn’t compare those.
They also have them at my former high school. The remote control has a barcode reader on it. The teacher scans a barcode in the book and the disk instantly goes to that section of the video. Ultra cool.
Nope, laserdisc is an analog medium, although I believe some later versions had digital audio. Remember, laserdisc was developed in the mid-late 70s; digital video was just a gleam in an engineers eye (and digital audio was only available to professionals; no CDs yet).
Regarding quality, on a smaller screen (< 35") with a good-quality comb filter (LD stores a composite signal) you might not notice a difference between LD & DVD. With larger screens, the difference would probably be more apparent.
Regarding the OP, considering the extremely reasonable cost of DVD players, why would anyone want to buy LDs (that is, assuming that what you’re looking for is available on DVD)?
Didn’t those stores switch to selling DVDs? If not, why not?
Couldn’t have been when they first came out; I recall seeing the first production LD player in a store (Magnavox Discovision - yes, that was the name they originally chose for it) in 1979.
My mistake - the format was actually developed in the late 60s-early 70s
astro, LaserDisc’s are analog, while DVD’s are digital. This leads to arguments that belong in Great Debates. Just as some folks will argue over LP’s verses CD’s, you get that same arguments over LD’s verses DVD’s.
LD vs. DVD: A Fundamental Difference describes how an analog signal is recorded on a LD.
Here is a photo of a LD taken with a scanning electron microscope.
The Laserdisc FAQ has a lot of info about LD’s, but it is now dated.
And in the interests of equal time, here is the DVD FAQ.
I guess it was when they became afordable and/or somewhat popular, not when they came out.