Something awesome I didn't have back then is LaserDisc. Huge optical discs, usually two sided, containing analog video and – at least for the newer ones – digital audio.
Picture quality way better than VHS. But the players and the discs were very expensive back then so it didn't have a huge success (not a total failure). Once DVD came out LD was rendered completely obsolete.
I got a player roughly 10 years ago on the fleamarket for 5€… and never tried it beyond playing a normal audio CD and forgot about the device. First time trying the video part was some months ago when I got a CD Video. Ordering a few cheap Wii games and some more stuff from Medimops I decided to get the absolute cheapest LD they had. Not that I'm interested in opera very much, but for a test it was good enough. I would have preferred having the original Star Wars Trilogy, but the price isn't as convincing as the movies.
My LD player looks pretty beat up. No idea what the previous owner did to the outer case. Luckily the technical side is still working, which is a pleasant surprise after the huge number of failing old devices lately.
When the machine opens the tray this looks pretty impressive – so do the huge discs. Not only are they like vinyl records, they are also thick and pretty heavy. Reaching up to 1800RPM the player gets pretty loud and I can only imagine what spinning that huge and heavy thing means for the mechanical parts inside. Not gonna use the player much → They are also expensive on eBay. No second player for 5€. But I will try to get a few movies for using it from time to time.
The two LDs came in a strong original packaging – even still sealed. After opening that I couldn't help myself but thinking: "There was a time when we actually got something for our money!". Nice booklet with pictures and some background information. F… stupid streaming!
Biggest problem is my urge to backup all data. With the DVD recorder being not really cooperative this took a while. Now I will have to prepare the data on PC, do some nice DVD authoring and burn the result to a single DVD+R DL. When copying a LaserDisc to DVD it is a good idea to choose the highest data rate the recorder supports. With analog noise in video the quality of the copy will suffer from heavy compression artifacts otherwise.
Picture quality way better than VHS. But the players and the discs were very expensive back then so it didn't have a huge success (not a total failure). Once DVD came out LD was rendered completely obsolete.
I got a player roughly 10 years ago on the fleamarket for 5€… and never tried it beyond playing a normal audio CD and forgot about the device. First time trying the video part was some months ago when I got a CD Video. Ordering a few cheap Wii games and some more stuff from Medimops I decided to get the absolute cheapest LD they had. Not that I'm interested in opera very much, but for a test it was good enough. I would have preferred having the original Star Wars Trilogy, but the price isn't as convincing as the movies.
My LD player looks pretty beat up. No idea what the previous owner did to the outer case. Luckily the technical side is still working, which is a pleasant surprise after the huge number of failing old devices lately.
When the machine opens the tray this looks pretty impressive – so do the huge discs. Not only are they like vinyl records, they are also thick and pretty heavy. Reaching up to 1800RPM the player gets pretty loud and I can only imagine what spinning that huge and heavy thing means for the mechanical parts inside. Not gonna use the player much → They are also expensive on eBay. No second player for 5€. But I will try to get a few movies for using it from time to time.
The two LDs came in a strong original packaging – even still sealed. After opening that I couldn't help myself but thinking: "There was a time when we actually got something for our money!". Nice booklet with pictures and some background information. F… stupid streaming!
Biggest problem is my urge to backup all data. With the DVD recorder being not really cooperative this took a while. Now I will have to prepare the data on PC, do some nice DVD authoring and burn the result to a single DVD+R DL. When copying a LaserDisc to DVD it is a good idea to choose the highest data rate the recorder supports. With analog noise in video the quality of the copy will suffer from heavy compression artifacts otherwise.
