2015 - Time to buy my first Laserdisc Player

in a recent video a few people commented that they noticed a laserdisc player in my TV cabinets the thing that stopped right behind the window there now it hasn't been there since the 1990s it's actually a recent acquisition there are some times that do tend to leave these little breadcrumbs in videos to give people an idea on something I'm working on that'll come out in the future and this was one of those occasions but why did I buy a laserdisc player well over the last few years I've enjoyed learning about technology that I didn't have when it was aired like a reel-to-reel or an 8-track or @fe father and al qussair a Phillips DCC these are all things I couldn't own at the time they were out for one reason or another but I've been able to pick up through ebay so it should come as no great surprise that the laserdisc player also came from eBay back in June I managed to pick up a pioneer CLD 9 to 5 and 32 movies for 280 pounds are not insignificant amounts of money but not ridiculous either also later on I bought another sets of 28 films for 43 pounds delivered which was quite a good deal now just to set out my stall for all the laserdisc nerds this isn't all about the technology of laserdisc the ins and outs of the intricacies of laserdisc if you want something like that well you know that there's loads of places around like that and you might as well start at Wikipedia but know this video is more about just what I learn by picking up an old laserdisc player and whether I got along with it or not now first off if you're looking for one go on ebay look through the laters this players is quite a good selection on there but you'll see some very expensive top-of-the-range ones you might be better off looking a little bit further down the range like I did now while I was looking through there today I saw this machine that pioneered e v l9 o now I know this takes me right back back when I bought my first DVD player in 1998 this was next to it on the shelf and I wasn't sure whether to pay the extra for the DVD and laser disc player just to hedge my bets in case DVD never took off now at the time I bought the DVD player for 400 pounds but it did include a copy of Starship Troopers so not all bad now you can see even on the Pioneer website for the time they were hedging their bets as well they were making more D we all 9:09 the laserdisc player version at the top six thousand a month where's a DVD play they were only starting making three thousand of those a month so in 1998 laserdisc was where it was at which is coincidentally the same year that this latest play was made that pioneer CL DD 9 to 5 I know that because I've got the instruction booklet for it and you can see here the manufacture date September 98 which is really in the twilight years of the format because in the year 2000 the last US laserdisc release came out and in 2001 the last one came out in Japan but in 1998 this was pretty much cutting edge technology with digital memory each side playing all and latest whiz-bang features perhaps the most important of which is the ability to play both pal and ntsc discs because at the time in the UK a lot of disks were imported because they weren't available here you can see it's a UK model because we've got the scar sockets on the back here as well as the s-video out and the standard composite video connector and at the time this was our most people in the UK were properly plugging into the 28 or 32 inch televisions with a scart lead now going back through video games console connections for a second you remember back in the days of Atari used to plug things in using the aerial connector then when Nintendo you might have gone up to the composite lead and then perhaps PC engine or something use an s-video lead Xbox component video and then more recently everything just uses HDMI but unfortunately poor old laserdisc is stuck back with composite video now I know there's those different connectors on the back of a laserdisc player but they're all led by composite video because that's the actual video that's on the laserdisc itself the different connectors are all basically feeding a composite video signal into different kinds of cables and in the case of the s-video on it's actually making a bit of a mess of it as well so you burn off just sticking with the straight composite video arrow though during the 2000s when people were still watching their latest collections but wanted to watch them on bigger screens perhaps the first HD TVs they started using scalars to upscale that composite video signal into something that looked more pleasing on a larger screen but reading through the laserdisc forms nowadays the few people's are sticking with the format say that generally you'll find that the scaler in a modern television is just as good as any of those separate devices so they tend to just use the built-in scalars in modern TVs and plug in that standard composite video signal into it and that's about the best signal best video quality you're gonna get out of a laserdisc unfortunately it's a completely different story when it comes to audio though you can see we've got stereo RCA jacks an optical digital out and then over on this side we've got an AC 3 RF out there what's that well this player and a lot of other ones are capable of doing Dolby Digital 5.1 yeah the modern table digital that you used to listening to on a DVD for example now you can see here that the first dolby digital mix on a laserdisc was in 1995 again very late in the format's life we've only got five years after that before they stopped making them in the US now if you look at these specs of the laser this version of Dolby Digital versus the DVD version you can see the kilobits a little bit lower you do notice that sometimes but overall it does hold up really well now if people used to import this from the u.s. to the UK because the UK discs didn't include Dolby Digital you see this one here the UK versions got Dolby Surround which is pretty much like Pro Logic whereas the US version has a c3 digital sound now that's because the PAL version needed a bit more space on the disk for the PAL signal which was actually a little bit better in quality than the US version now laserdisc changed a lot over its life it was first introduced in 1978 but to squeeze the Dolby Digital into it they had to do a little bit of clever messing about to squeeze it in with the video signal somehow and it's shown as our fac-3 not your normal one you can just plug into an amp no this one needs to be D modulated before your AV can receive it and for that you need a demodulator there this is a separate box the Hat sub I and what happens is the AC 3 RF version goes in one socket and then out of the other one you just get your normal coax Dolby Digital which your AV and will receive and little light comes on when it's working there of course amps that were out at the time sometimes had the relevant sockets on but my modern-day one doesn't that's why I need to use this separate adapter anyway I've got everything I need to be able to play laser this there and as you can see I can get the full AC 3 soundtrack and besides which I've also got to plug in the other two connectors in case I've just got a stereo disc or one that's using the pro logic so it's using up quite a few sockets on the back of my um those top remotes for a second as you can see the remote that comes with it is very comprehensive you got a button for everything here and included at the bottom is a jog shuttle dial something you don't see on modern-day remotes but I remember being quite the vogue in the nineties you can skip through the video here but you can also go through it frame by frame by moving the little wheel around here I'll show you that later on now if we look at the typical laserdisc release we'll see that you've got the disc here that says side 1 CL V and then side 2 is also CL V but side 3 or disc 3 part 1 is C AV now what's the difference well see AV is constant angular velocity you don't need to worry about that but what it means is it names you to look at every single frame on the disc a frame at a time which is where your jog shuttle dial comes in the only disadvantage is you can only get 30 minutes per side on a disc whereas with the CL v you can get 60 minutes per side now it was quite common at the time for films that were too long to fit on one disc to split them across two but have the last disc in CA V format so you could watch the big finale frame by frame some of the most prized laser discs come from criterium where they really went all out and put the whole film in C AV format so they had to split it across six discs the film is actually on the first two disc size 1 to 4 and then the optional extras are on the last disc which is sides 5 & 6 there's a lot of extras on here you can see them all listed on the right hand side and to get to those you have to jump to those individual chapter numbers or watch them from the beginning to the end the complete opposites all this 90's access of these films I got from the early eighties I want you to see this again since I was a child I remember it being quite good it isn't it's terrible but the other way you can get hold of it is on video tape or on laser discs of course I've got hold a laser disc similarly rough cut see it stars Burt Reynolds there but it's also got David Niven in it in one of his last roles and I don't remember ever seeing that so John watching that and Carbon Copy looks really racist it's Denzel Washington in one of his first big roles but in fact it's actually a bit of a heartwarming comedy if not also pretty damn terrible however these early dis just basically have the film beginning to end split over two sides no chapters or anything laserdisc was never a massive success but it's best it only penetrated less than one percent of households but those people that could afford it when it was perhaps in its heyday in the 1990s managed to get hold of most of the latest releases on laserdisc and these are the ones you now see a lot of on eBay they were letterbox versions which was quite novelty that Simon of course we have those Dolby Digital soundtracks and people even imported discs from Japan laserdisc was quite a bit more successful in Japan I think is because it was a bit more robust than video tape for the rental market but of course these have English soundtracks now laserdisc was really where the special collector's edition started all the optional extras and really deluxe editions like the Signature Edition here we've got all this information in the mid lovely big pictures here and of course quite a few extras about the making of the film and those kind of things things that became quite common on DVD later on but started off on laserdisc and of course the artwork really shines on these big sleeves and it also gives people room to put extra information on the back of them the kind of thing you couldn't feel on the back of a DVD or blu-ray but the cost imagine back in the day somebody paying thirty pounds to watch The Flintstones or perhaps 40 pounds to watch blown away and those were some of the cheaper ones I suppose those big multi disc Signature Edition some of those would be about a hundred pounds or so and that's why I'm so glad back in the day I never managed to get into laserdisc because I already updated various films from VHS to widescreen VHS to DVD to DVD special edition to blu-ray imagine had also gone and bought a hundred-pound laserdisc to go with those I'd be absolutely gut in there so yeah glad I never got into them then but I'm enjoying it now now you can still get some sealed discs and you'll notice from looking at some of those discs earlier on that people tend to leave the polythene on the outside of them to protect them these things were really bought by proper film collectors film buffs people didn't mind paying through the nose to get a special version of their favourite film now there's still something really magical about the size of these discs for example I'll just eject the CD mechanism there that's what the CD tray looks like but this one also of course eject the full front of the thing to get the laser disc tray out of there look at the size of that there's something slightly amusing yeah pretty impressive about laser discs the actual size of them it's just something that you don't get nowadays everything's gotten smaller compact all digital you don't actually get things like this and for some reason I'm just really interested in silly old formats that don't make sense anymore but to me I find them charming anyway you can see there that player takes a couple of seconds to get up and running but it's working fine now back in the day this laser display would have probably being plugged into a CRT television maximum size perhaps 36 inches nowadays I'm going to be plugging into this plasma TV which is 60 inches really that's pushing it pretty much beyond what it's capable of doing if you blow a signal up to large of course it's going to look soft and that's what tends to happen with laser this especially on a screen this size then there's one thing that confuses a lot of people about laser discs because it looks like a giant CD they assume it's going to be some sort of digital video but it isn't it's an analog video composite signal that's on there it's read by a laser but it's a purely analog video signal which is something you notice as soon as you start playing it on your television I forgot what how long video look like I'm so used to seeing digital video whether it's through my skybox or whatever it's a long time since I saw anything in analog and it's very soft now luckily I have three copies of Lethal Weapon on laserdisc now DVD and blu-ray so it can compare those three for video quality so let's have a look at this still this is blu-rays you can see at the bottom right there and then that's DVD noir the aspect ratio changes actually speaking in the settings slightly wrong and then finally that's laserdisc now that is really soft isn't it and quite washed out looking as well if we just go back a second and have a look at the hand on the left there notice the extra detail you see even just on the DVD and then even more of course on the blu-ray you can see the wrinkles on the palm of the hand there let's just have a look at another still here so that's the blu-ray one first of all and then there's the DVD slightly different aspect ratio game but just look at the detail in there and then finally back to the laserdisc so a lot softer now this might be because the DVD I've got is special edition remastered etc etc whereas the laserdisc is just the original video pressing back in the day there weren't too great at putting stuff on to video that have been on film and they've got better over the years so where's your laser this might be stuck in time you might find that a more recent version of a DVD looks better than the one that came out back in the day but with all that said and done I'm afraid DVDs to me to look considerably better than the laser discs but whilst there's people out there that will disagree and say you can do some upscaling and all that kind of stuff it's all academic because blu-ray looks better than both of them I really wish laser this was more like vinyl that the better the equipment you played it on the better the video you got out of it but I'm afraid the video is the video it's just stuck in that quality now they did try to improve the video quality of lasers they spy releasing these squeezed Aldys now these were only released in Japan there are only a few titles released these were anamorphic lis squeeze laser discs so that when you squash the video down you got more horizontal resolution than you would on a traditional laser disc however in my experience the results that's not much in it at all really and of course unfortunately with them being Japanese they've all got Japanese hard-coded subtitles on them that's the thing with laser this they tend to have subtitles you can't switch off one feature about laser discs that might take people by surprise is that there's no menu on them it just goes straight into the film unlike a DVD or a blu-ray where you can go to certain scenes or special features you've got to access those on a laserdisc by picking the chapter number that they're on just look at the back of the sleeve of the disc and jump to the appropriate chapter one nice feature of them being analog though is that you can just fast forward past all the stuff that you don't want so as soon as you put a film in you'd have to watch all the trailers and things you can just whizz past all that pass of credits and get straight into the film itself one of the most widely spread bits of misinformation that I've regularly seen about laser discs is that they've all got disc rot you can't watch any of these old films it's such a shame because they've all rotted away due to disc roll the images are unwatchable as you can see this is an early 80s laser disc and it's not bad at all than the fact it's 4:3 ratio but beggars can't be choosers now I'm not saying disk rot doesn't happen you can see on this disk here doesn't reflect the light propers it kind of misting on the left-hand side there a bit of a mottled effect it is something that does happen it's just not as common as people make out here's a video we dis growth this is what it looks like these little black lines coming across here that little meteorites flying across the screen that's what this crop looks like now i'm really close up as you can see here and overall it's not that bad i managed to watch this film however there are some films that are worse than others for example this one only this three does this but it does have some pretty bad rot on it so let me show you what that looks like this is the worst i've experienced so far now again i'll be zooming up on this just so you can get an idea but that's what that looks like proper video noise coming across there you can imagine in a few years this is probably going to be unwatchable but still watchable now i got through the first two dis and then this was just the last 20 minutes it was a bit like this which was a bit of a shame but there you go perhaps of all the discs i watched so far it's only happened for a couple of them and then some of them only for a few minutes so overall not as big a deal as people make err in my experience now the reason i bought the criterion edition of the killer is because to the best of my knowledge it's the only version with correct subtitles i'll show you what i mean in a second when these two characters cherry on fat and Danny Lee say their childhood nicknames which they're just making up on the spot he says I Butthead he's numbnuts ok not the funniest line in the movie but there you go now let's have a look at the video of how much to dig out in the video recorder just kind of quality of this bugger that's terrible but these are called dub titles this is when someone listens to a dub and then just types in as the subtitles I'm Dumbo he's Mickey Mouse so for years I thought that was the line in the film where it was just some guy making it up there just look at the quality again as I flip back to the laserdisc look how much better that is you can see what a strength lays this was compared to video which of course was the dominant form at the time and I find it really hard to believe that I was able to watch that bad then I think it was ok now let's break out the junk shuttle dial and have a go with some of these trick play features so if you have a look at the front of the laserdisc player at the moment you can see the time counting up that's because it's playing a normal seat Alvie disc if I swap that over for a CA v disc that killer you can see every single time that number goes up that's a separate frame of video and you can access any those frames individually so let's sort of play around with that again looking at this scene here just something it plays in slow motion anyway that wasn't me but I just noticed something that's let me go back just see if I can pause it for you just in the right part look it up right in the middle there just a bit wasn't left it's a tripod looking at this camera so cameraman looking at the cameraman don't think that was supposed to be in the crowd scene now let's fast forward a little bit further on in the movie saw something there so I'll just rewind I wanna have a look at our explosion so you can see here shoot those dodgy moustache looking out there that's it slow motion to start with but look what I can do with the jog shuttle dial here I can get it moving in super slow motion can freeze it bring it forward frame by frame okay there's no moving it frame by frame now you try doing that with a DVD player or a blu-ray I don't think there's anything that enables you to do that there are days you can jump around a little bit pause and stuff go frame by frame but not with this level of control again one last scene here just something I noticed when I was watching it the other day you might have missed summer but it struck home with me just look at this go for it he misses the play button on the cassette player there so this is coming in whoops missed it down a bit play now that's the kind of thing that I spend hours messing around we're doing multiple retakes of me putting USB leads into a computer so I really sympathize with them there but of course they were putting it into films they didn't see that when they put it together originally whereas it takes me 10 minutes to put a USB plug into something now even the simplest laserdisc film comes on two sides of a disc whereas the more complicated ones are spread across multiple discs therefore it really makes sense to get a player that can play both sides of the disc without you having to flip it over manually it will get on your nerves a little bit now this one has a quick change so it can flip size pretty quickly so let's have a look what happens so it just gets the end there that's side a as you can see on the screen it's saying side a to B you can see the laserdisc player going through its motions there and little light flashing at the top so it takes I don't know perhaps 5 seconds or so perhaps a little bit longer but then you get on to side B that's a lot better than getting up out of your chair so if you are buying a laserdisc play in there I'd really recommend that you look at a both sides play machine they're looking on ebay through laserdiscs you can see that there are some good deals in here for very cheap titles and then there are some more expensive ones that are sort of collector's editions and things in my opinion I probably won't go for the expensive ones because remember the quality that we're talking about may be better off getting a blu-ray or something however one thing I'd recommend you might want to do type the phrase job lot in there you'll find people sometimes getting rid of entire collections for quite low amounts of money now using those a collection only due to the weight of the laserdisc but you can get some good deals there sometimes if you find someone locally selling their entire collection now as we mentioned laserdisc died pretty quickly in about 2000 shortly after the introduction of DVD which really took off like wildfire now the last laserdisc released in Japan was in 2001 happened to be this film here which is Tokyo Raiders but this isn't a laserdisc this is a VCD I've got of that film and that's a former that seems to have died off as well rather predictably just like every other old form I've tried era I've grown really fond of laserdisc I'm not quite sure why it might be the ridiculously oversized discs or this sleeve art or things like this buck litter you get with Jurassic Park I even like the massive machine that's as big as my amp and the fact is the sound on it is pretty good unfortunately though laserdisc has got no chance of staging a vinyl type comeback because the video quality just isn't there the sounds fine but the video it's just hampered with that composite signal that just can't scale up to a modern big-screen experience now laserdisc did have one last hurrah in Japan at least with a HD version the high vision Muse player very expensive players very expensive discs to play on them and they've all got hard-coded Japanese subtitles so not something I'm going to be trying out but I just thought I'd mention it all the same but it was very short-lived anyway there's a few people out there that like things wrapping up really neatly so at the end I'm supposed to say don't buy a laserdisc player or everyone should buy one but I really don't know it's entirely up to you I've got to say though it has earned its own place in my a V rack which is something I wasn't expecting it to do when I first picked it up besides which I've got all these films to watch and a good film is still a good film even if it's a little bit soft around the edges anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 1,104,732

Rating: 4.9157867 out of 5

Keywords: Techmoan, LaserDisc (Media Format), review, test, video, quality, pioneer, CLD-D925, soft, dolby digital, ac3, second hand, new, latest, old, tech, retro, vintage, HD, Laserdisc Player, laserdisk, laserdiscs, ebay, second, hand, 12, videodisc, films, media, widescreen, surround, dolby stereo

Id: KOrn2hBsYKE

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2015