Hello All!

I am new to the forum. I recently purchased a LD player and some movies from ebay. They are currently on the way
I purchased a Pioneer CLD-S201 for $40. After researching a bit on here yesterday I have somewhat buyers remorse, after hearing it isn't the best possible player. I figure I will rock it for now and upgrade around the holidays perhaps. Excited to start collecting though. The first movies I bought are John Woo's The Killer and Hard Boiled. Both of which I've never seen before. I also have Dr. Phibes on the way as well. I guess my only starting question is... What will be my biggest limitations with this player? Other than certain outputs and having to get up and flip the disk, am I going to lose out on any disk features?


Thanks Again!

It pretty much barely reads one side of the disc and does that very poorly. LD picture quality solely rely on the quality of the player.

I have 5 LD players, two of them are the "Elite" series Pioneer, all play both sides without manual flipping. I have read some articles on the individual players that I have and in those articles I read that in some cases the Elite Model was actually not as good as the regular model. My experience has been (and I have owed players back to the very beginning) is that the quality of the picture is dictated more by the quality of the original film and the transfer to laserdisc. There were many manufacturers of LD's and I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of the process. I know that I have some discs that look and sound great, some look great, sound poor and some look OK and sound poor.

In the case of LD's I guess you would have to say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Believe it or not, on a good setup older discs look much better than post-90s discs. They started messing with edge/detail enhancement/noise reduction around early 90s.

I get the best picture from late 80s japanese pressings on my hld-x0, crystalio2, pioneer elite kuro plasma.

I'd agree with you that discs from the 80s can look surprisingly good (especially on a modern display), but some old discs can also look really bad. It's really hit or miss, which is fully understandable as the masters we're talking about are very old. Still to this day, I find the original Criterion CAV edition of Blade Runner (1987) to be one of the best looking LDs out there.

There are a lot of nice 80's disks - the 1985 CAV Star Wars disk is another good example. From about 1990 on Laserdisc masters were from digital D2 tape, and it was easier to slathe on edge enhancement etc. Heck, even a few Discovision releases can look really nice - they had an amazing master tape system in the early days, but often screwed up the transfers themselves with bad contrast/brightness. But when they get that right they look as good as later 80's disks.

With players, there are a lot of things that need to be done Just Right to get a great LD picture, otherwise you might have picture noise from the audio channels (which need NR to fix) and ringing/ghosting from not handling de-emphasis just right. On the low end Pioneer didn't even try for perfection, the players just had to beat VHS with enough margin. That said by the time the 201 came out there were considerable improvements in the base chips*, and the 8-bit digital TBC helps (the 201 et al are not pure analog players)

The 201 and 104 aren't terrible players, they just aren't particularly great ones. (note that substance owns the greatest player )

For the players with only composite output what you plug it into matters, if you have a 3D comb filter and NR that just happens to play nicely with LD's you can at least partially catch up to fancier players.

(* - low end PAL players did not get them.)

In my books if you're just starting out then any player is a good player if it gets you into the format : ) I think it's best to make sure the format is for you before you shell out for a higher quality player.

Welcome to the forum, I look forward to reading your posts.

I'm new here, just joined today in October.
I collected LDs since the early '90s, buying at used laserdisc stores, cutouts at Camelot Music, mailorder laserdisc club, and some rare titles on ebay and elsewhere until DVD took over. In the mid-80s I bought a CED player and stack of discs when that format went obsolete. I've followed the technology of videodiscs since the early 1970s when I first read about them, and as a child in the '60s even thought that moving-picture visuals should accompany records.