Why Did I Buy a Laserdisc Player in 2019?

so I'm sure many of you if not all of you know what DVDs and blu-rays are they are ways for you to watch a movie or TV show on your home TV screen using an optical disk well there was well there were actually several media that also did the same thing using optical discs but the one that I'm talking about today is laser disc technology now I'm not going to go into detail about laser disc technology there's already plenty of videos on YouTube that do a much better job that than I ever could I recommend tech Mon and Technology connections channels on that because they have entire series devoted to laser discs what I'm doing today is I'm just sharing with you my experience and my thoughts on the technology this is a laserdisc player this one in particular according to the sticker on the back here says it was manufactured in July 1995 laser discs have been around since the 70s in fact it was a competitor and a superior technology to VHS tapes the thing that were DVDs replaced this is one of the later gen players and I ain't got this just this month why well it's actually pretty simple I had a laserdisc player growing up my dad collected laserdisc movies and by the time he died earlier this decade he his collection had grown to about three dozen movies total the player that we had unfortunately died and is so beyond usable and we got rid of it years ago any way but I never got rid of those movies there was just a nostalgic factor to them and I didn't want to give them up so to play them I got this player and my hope with this video is to show you guys the difference between laserdisc movies and DVD and VHS and even blu-ray to show the comparison and quality between them give you an overview of what laser discs are capable of that no other media can do and so hopefully through all of that I will I'll share my passion with you guys and show you why I love this so much let's go ahead and jump right in alright so let's do a quick overview of laserdiscs so let's go ahead and use the Star Wars trilogy special edition as a example this was the release that came out after the special edition was released in theaters in 1997 and it comes in a total of nine laser discs eight of which are double-sided and it also comes with this beautiful artwork inside that gives you a chapter selection for each of the films and an overview of the special edition as well this kind of stuff just doesn't exist anymore with physical media but back in laserdisc days it was almost expected to see it anyway like I said laser discs came with two different sides for most movies each side could hold roughly an hour of film and the Star Wars films being two and a half hours long each required three sides so yeah this is how big the laser discs are and if you want a comparison between a laser disc and a DVD well I happen to have a DVD right here that I'll go ahead and compare there we go as you can see the laser just saw absolutely huge in comparison they're about the size of a 12-inch vinyl record and these are some of the laser discs that I have this is just a small selection my dad bought so many laser discs for films a lot of them were Disney films for us kids and action films for himself and romantic comedies for my mom and he just took such great care of them and these are just some amazing films and if you guys haven't seen any of these films I highly recommend that you do just absolute classics all of them and it's just a fun bit of history to a look and see that these were bought on sale at Blockbuster for 10 bucks back in the 80s and yet look at this absolutely pristine condition snow white in the 7 doors there's just so much content on these discs that aren't on DVDs and blu-rays these days there's a lot of special features that are on these discs that have never been migrated upwards anyway let's go ahead and look at the player itself turning it on as you can see gives you that nice amber display there on the front oh man just so much nostalgia so many electronics I had growing up that used a display just like this it may must have just been what was expected of electronics in the 80s and 90s all the way until the early 2000s this player did come with a remote control and popping open the disc tray it actually went all the way out of frame that's how big it is so after readjusting the camera so you can see it a bit better this is huge like I said laser discs are twelve inches wide the size of vinyl records but they stick snugly inside the tray just like that and you can use the remote to open and close it almost all of the controls necessary to play a movie are on the player itself but the remote helps with a lot of extra fun things that I'll show you later on anyway you might be used to plopping a disc into a player these days and it goes to a main menu laser discs didn't have main menus what you would do is when you would put the laser disc into the tray and shut the tray it would instantly start playing just right away just go straight into whatever was on the disc that's because this is not a digital video it's actually an analog video there's a difference it's a little low it's way too technical for me to get into but another thing is it does support digital surround sound it's weird analog audio digital or I'm sorry analog video digital audio don't really know why but so anyway the opening to the Star Wars laserdisc opens up with that and if you don't like that you can just skip and go straight to the to the movie itself and as you can see the letterboxing is actually programmed directly into the disc so you do lose a lot of resolution as a result but luckily my TV has a zoom in function that takes off the letterboxing pretty much perfectly and as you can see there you can use the skip to go straight into a different chapter with very little lag anyway so you might be able to see underneath the number four there that's a CLV and under three here this is a CA V and there were two different kinds of laser discs that I didn't even find this out until very recently so this side that I'm showing you is the CL V that's just the standard laser disc side that can hold up to an hour of video but the C AV it can actually hold half an hour but you can actually see the pits right there where the video goes the the advantage of the C AV is that you're able to pause and frame buffer forwards and backwards step forwards and backwards a single frame as I'm about to show here in a movie and what a lot of movies did is they would make the final side of the laserdisc movie see a V in order to take advantage of this so that you'll be able to see a much clearer climax and be able to step forwards and backwards however you wanted anyway this laserdisc player also supports audio CDs and a lot of blazers displayers did the one I had growing up did and just fun fact there's a lot of PlayStation 1 games including Tekken 3 what I just put in there that if you put them into a CD player it plays the soundtrack from the game [Music] all right now the only film that I really have in enough media in order to compare between laserdisc and how it looks against everything else is Star Wars I have the special edition for everything but I do have the VHS and the special DVD that comes with a disc of the original and a disc of the special edition so I'll be making multiple comparisons here of a specific scene and I really hope Lucasfilm doesn't copyright this video anyway as you can see this is the VHS this is how most people would have seen the film when it was first released on home video this is the unaltered Edition so there's no enhancements there's no color correction there's no cleanup of the film this is a direct film to a composite video conversion and it looks pretty muddy and this is the full-screen version as well so you're literally missing half the picture this is the laserdisc version and at first you might think it's not that much better but the big advantage is that it is widescreen so you do get that picture back the colors are a lot better as well and the audio is a lot better too although unfortunately I can't show you guys the audio it trust me though it does sound miles better even with with analogue cables and the reason that it looks so bad is because I actually zoomed it in and editing when you're playing it on your TV it looks like this unfortunately the letterboxing is programmed straight into the video so you do lose all of those lines of resolution but it looks a lot better when it sumed out and the TV that I have does a pretty good job of enhancing the video so it looks a lot better when i zoom it in on the TV itself and this is how good a laserdisc would have looked compared to a VHS back in the day anyway this is the DVD that I have of the non special edition of Star Wars and the colors are very washed out the resolution is probably comparable to the VHS there's the they this release of the movie is just so bad it's notoriously bad it literally looks like they might have shot a vid Oh camera pointed at a wall that it was on anyway this is the DVD for the special edition and it looks just so much better the colors are way better the resolution is higher you can see details and it's beginning to look more like you what you would expect for a film to look like if it was released this day and age it's just so much better it looks like you could be you know this looks way more tolerable let's just put it that way and of course the one that everyone knows and loves the blu-ray release and honestly I am having a very hard time seeing a difference between this and the special edition DVD blu-ray is full HD but putting this side-by-side with the DVD it's really hard to see any differences most of the differences are in colors not in actual clarity of details the special edition DVD was mastered wonderfully and hopefully that shows anyway now we got a four way comparison the VHS versus the laser does zoomed in versus the special edition DVD versus the blu-ray and hopefully this gives you a pretty good idea of how much better the laserdisc would have looked over the VHS back in the day which is when it was most most prevalent obviously the DVD looks better than laser disc and blu-ray looks way better than everything else but that's just to be expected that's just how far technology has come there's no reason for you to own a laserdisc player these days blu-ray just does everything way better especially now with 4k but this all doesn't matter anyway since the best version of Star Wars is the holiday special [Music] so that wraps up this video if you liked the video please leave a like and let me know in the comments if you knew what laserdisc were before you watch this video I'm sure some of my younger viewers never even heard of laserdisc so I'm interested in reading every single comment you guys have to share thanks for watching everyone and this thing is really really heavy [Music]

Channel: Skul

Views: 25,681

Keywords: laserdisc, laserdiscs, laserdisc player, laserdisc collection, what are laserdiscs, what laserdisc, pioneer laserdsic player, s104, laserdisc vs vhs, laserdisc vs dvd, laserdisc vs blu-ray, star wars laserdisc

Id: W90mTzU_GZo

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 10 2019