All things Laserdisc - Page 3

It is funny that I thought I would be holding on to the DAWN OF SOUND and FORBIDDEN HOLLYWOOD collections for ever, but most of the films on those lasers have been released through Warner Archives or through the TCM Forbidden Hollywood collections.  It seems that the one I am holding on to are Paramount titles, such as SAMSON AND DELIALH, Universal owned THE UNINVITED and ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, and the extended versions of THE ALAMO, HAWAII, IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD, LOST HORIZON (1973) and 1776.  Sony passed on the Pioneer versions several years ago, and I don't think the extended versions will ever see the light day, despite Mr Harris' tireless effort.  The others are no where on anyones radar.

The titles that I still have that I bet even money they appear in the Warner Archives next year are, THE HUMAN COMEDY, THE HORN BLOWS AT MIDNIGHT, GEORGE WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE, THE HUCKSTERS, ATHENA, SUMMER HOLLI DAY, EVERYTHING I HAVE IS YOURS, LOVELY TO LOOK AT, SHOW BUSINESS, THAT'S RIGHT YOUR WRONG, and RACHEL AND THE STRANGER. 

I guess I will always have a laser disc or two, just as I still have a few VHS titles that did not make it laser or DVD. 

Edited by ahollis - 10/25/10 at 10:20am

Give a Girl a Break is already being offered. Perhaps you meant Everything I Have Is Yours. Roberta is already available on regular DVD. I assume you meant Lovely to Look At.

You are right.  Damn those Marge & Gower Champion films. Sometimes I can't keep them straight.  You are also right about LOVELY TO LOOK AT.  I was thinking about the double laser on both films.  I have GIVE A GIRL A BREAK on order and looking forward to it.  Have you seen it yet? 

I have it, but I haven't gotten to it as yet, and with a fresh influx today of new discs to review, I doubt I'll get to it until later in the week. But I am looking forward to it.

With abundance of WA titles, I don't see how you have time to anything, even post.  Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the next group.

Still love LaserDisc. My collection is upto around 500 now. Got quite a few duplicate titles too. If anyone has any to swap, get in touch.

 

Full list and video clips of all the discs I have available on YouTube and The LaserDisc Forum

 

Edited by djmarch - 11/2/10 at 5:29pm

I'm listing another 50 or so items from my rapidly dwindling Laserdisc collection on e-bay again this month, and since some of you here are still actively adding to your own collections, I thought you might like to know. The first 2 dozen or so are already listed with about another 2 days still left on the selling time. The rest were listed yesterday and stillhave another 6 days or so left to bid. You can find all of my discs easily by using the advanced search function and searching for my selling name, whocruiser, as the Laserdiscs are all that I have listed at the moment. All are up with only a 99 cent starting bid & no reserve. I'm a bit sad to have to be selling, but hope you find something you like to add to your own collection :-) And by the way, once I'm done with the discs, I'll have an excellent condition and relatively lightly used Pioneer DVL-700 player to sell, probably before the year is out, if anyone wants to make an advance offer on it...

Cheers - whocruiser (Dan Harris)

On a Semi-related note, a bIg used record shop in my area just bought a collection of over 1200 CED RCA Selectavision discs! They came from a former RCA Sales rep!

Never saw so many in one place! They were getting $5 each and they were selling cause people though they were cool as object of art!

I have spent the last week doing a long list of performance mods to a Pioneer CLD-99... The results have been, well, startling. Ive replace 65 parts so far. I just order another 33 from Mouser. I focused on the RF to Video output path. Ive used a lot tantalum caps and some key points got multilayer ceramic and polypropylene. I addressed the FM demodulator, the amps and buffers, the A/D and the D/A and output amps.. I also addressed the power supply.

The results have been pretty remarkable. I would NEVER have thought a composite video source could look anything like this.

With the standard CLD-99 I was pretty unimpressed. Ive got a lot of handy high end gear and the Laser DIsc looked old and tired.. But now it seem to _exceed_ my Meridian 586 component out DVD player. The signal to noise ratio improvements of the video path have been dramatic. The bandwidth is also much wider and flatter. Its seeming video dynamic range is just incredible. Somehow it seems to easily exceed my DVD player. Blacks are just inky and you could almost consider black a color. The lack of digital compression seem to be visible in the picture. It has this wonderful smoothness combined with really crisp sharp and not over sharpened edges.

Im running he CLD-99 with noise reduction turned off. That looks best...

My next mods are going to be to the servo and tracking circuits as I saw some picture improvements related to servo performance. Maybe RF stability ? Plus im hoping to reduce digital audio jitter by doing a much better job in the servo / tracking circuits...

Is anyone else crazy enough to have done any mods to a laser disc player ?

Im even thinking about doing a side buis doing these mods to CLD-97 or CLD-99's.

What type of display, and what size, are you viewing it on?

I remember buying my first Laser disc player just for Star Wars. Everyone said I was crazy, as my friends bought DVD players. The player was used and still gets use. I got a bunch of movies for very little money. I plan to revisit them soon as well.

Im viewing it on 2 different display. The projector I got kinda famous for making back in the day http://www.xymox1.com/Resume/Press/index.htm and I have a modded Sony direct view CRT BVM. Im using a Audioquest Video Pro cable ( also from back in the day )

I started into this project as a client of mine had a huge LD collection and the CLD-99 had pretty much failed. I agreed to look at it and see if I could fix it, after fixing it I suggested I could improve it. I had no idea just how much improvement I could get out of it.

For some strange reason I seem to prefer it over the DVD player doing component. Its got this stunning dynamic range and I think that when you get dark scenes the LD seems to be a much better picture. More natural I guess. It must have to do with the compression of a digital device ? I just dont know. Hard to describe exactly. Of course the LD transfers can be bad tho so a remastered DVD can be better tho too.

For sure tho a LD can hold its own very nicely with DVD component with these mods..

The other thing I noticed was much like a really good audio system can make a bad recording less annoying the mods made watching noisy bad LD's much more pleasurable.

I did in the repair process discover a cap on the power supply board right next to a super hot zener diode that was half its value. This will happen to all CLD-99 and 97's and causes bad banding in the picture and tracking issues. The client has a second 99 with the same symptoms so I suspect this cap goes bad on all 99's & 97's. Just FYI.. I will get the number and post it here.

C23 will fail on ALL CLD-99 and 97's. Its just a matter of time. It gets baked by a hot zener next to it and loses value and causes bars to scroll from top to bottom in various widths depending on how fast the motor is spinning..

This cap can be increased to 2200uF from its 1000uF current value.

This cap should be replaced on ALL CLD-99's and 97's. Well along with all the power supply caps really... Just for good measure..

I also have Laser Disc for sale.

Have a look



Much Love

Nothing to look at, Tim.  If you tried to leave a link, you need to have a few more posts under your belt because of some anti-spamming features of our software.

 

And, if you would please list your LD for sale in our For Sale/Trade Classified section, please. 

 

Thanks.

Hey guys,

Sorry if this seems like an off base question.

Are there any examples that you guys have seen of laser discs using scene selection in a similar way to DVD's prior to 1997, or early that year?

By similar I mean using an image on a menu page that if you click on it goes to that portion of the movie.

How does scene selection typically work on laser discs?

Thanks so much it would be really helpful to get answers to these questions.

I started buying laserdiscs late in its life span (the mid-90's) and I don't recall ever getting a disc that didn't have chapters*. There was no menu like on a DVD though. The chapter selection on a laserdisc worked like a CD. You could pause the disc and enter the chapter number you wanted or you could skip chapters until you hit the one you wanted. The chapter titles would generally be printed somewhere on the sleeve.

* If I remember correctly, the CAV version of Star Wars had 90 chapters (!) over 5 sides but the norm was about the number of what you see on DVDs and Blu-rays today.

Many LD releases (probably Criterions, for the most part) would list all of the supplements on a separate chapter stop, but I don't know of any instance in which there were "links" through which you could execute the command to go there, like on a DVD or BD.  (Could it have been done?  I don't know.)

 

However, like Travis said, you could go to any chapter stop yourself if you saw something you wanted to get to right away and knew how to operate the machine.  On certain release such as Criterion's "Close Encounters" and maybe "Halloween", you could program the LD player to play chapters in a particular order. 

 

It's kind of amusing to recall that first generation CD and LD players all featured numeric keypads through which you could "program" your music or movies.  We still have the keypads on remotes, though I don't think "programming", as such, has any place in our viewing methods of today...but correct me if I'm wrong!

Not all laserdiscs had chapters, especially ones released in the 80s. There was no excuse for not putting chapters on music discs or ones with short films or cartoons. I got a bunch of Disney Cartoon Classics discs from someone, which weren't chaptered so the previous owner had printed out a page with the time counter readings for each cartoon.

And on earlier discs, times were only coded in full minutes, so you still needed to drive around a bit to arrive at the exact spot. I figured Disney just thought that these were being marketed as kids' entertainment that Mom would just start going, then leave while the urchins sat staring slack-jawed at the screen until the end. Of the two (Image?) Betty Boop single-disc releases, vol. 1 had no chapters but vol. 2 did. Apparently something kicked in with somebody somewhere.

Doing it again this month, just in time for Thanksgiving. about 25 titles posted already with 3 or 4 days to go, and another 25 or so by this weekend...

If I had a heart, this thread would surely warm it.

The last player I picked up was years ago when DVD was still growing in popularity. I still think about picking up a spare but considering how much time it's been (the miles these players have now) and how so many are listed as 'returns not accepted' on EBAY I'm super hesitant on the whole thing. I don't have a ton of laserdiscs but the ones I do have I like and some are much better than the DVD releases. I don't know what I'm going to do the day my player goes but it will likely involve a lot of tears and alcohol.

It's still possible to get an LD player professionally fixed, even in this age of "toss it when it breaks down" electronics.

I got my Pioneer 704 fixed last year, (after almost writing it off as a loss) and I think it works better now than it was new. Is it kosher to post a link to the company that fixed it in here?

You can at least PM it to some of us (hint, hint).

I don't see why it would be a problem.

 

I have a friend in the movie business, and about a year ago was lamenting the fact that my laser discs looked so dreadful on my 72 Mitsubishi hi-def screen.

He suggested I buy a Gefen TV Composite to HDMI Scaler
http://www.gefen.com/kvm/dproduct.jsp?prod_id=5281

I did, and it does an amazing job of upscaling my analog LDs so they look pretty good on my hi-def big old TV. While the $299 price tag might seem steep, when you consider all the money we have locked up in laser discs (remember those $100 box sets that came out almost monthly?), spending $300 to make them watchable isn't much at all. I'm running the lasers on a Pioneer Elite.

Don't recall anyone mentioning one of the great treasures on Laser Disc only--Francis Coppola's recut of Godfather and Godfather II into one chronological story. With all the fancy restoration that's been done on the original films for DVD and the blu-ray, I can't imagine you're ever going to see this version again. Only on LD!

Okay then.

http://www.laserdiscservice.com/

Hi Everyone! I came across a massive quantity of brand new laserdiscs. I pulled out 450 for myself to keep, and listed the rest on eBay. Feel free to check it out!

Moderator's NOTE: eBay link removed.

Andy: 

 

Welcome to the HTF!.  However, links to eBay auctions have been forbidden here for many years:

 

 

 

You would have the option of listing the laserdiscs in our Software for Trade/Sale section.