I'm Marcus Rowland, a London (UK) based retired technician and author of role playing games and fiction. I've got a Pioneer CLD D5215, before that I had a CLD V2300D industrial laserdisc player, which was single sided, PAL and NTSC, digital sound, and before that a Pioneer LD-V4100 (another industrial player, single sided, PAL only, analog sound).

My first encounter with laserdiscs was the old Domesday Book system that was briefly available in the UK, a hugely expensive set of kit that consisted of a laserdisc player, BBC Micro computer, external hard disk and lots of specialised ROMS to accommodate a multimedia survey of Britain. The whole setup cost about $5000 in the early 1980s. These days it'd all fit on a DVD and there are occasional rumours that someone is doing the conversion. Many years later I went to an educational technology fair and found my first laserdisc player on a stall selling 2nd hand educational electronics, books, software etc. Got the player, remote, etc. and four or five educational discs for £20, about $35 at that time. Soon after I stumbled across an on-line community (now long defunct) where there was a brisk trade in 2nd hand LDs. Bought a job lot, sold about half for more than I'd paid for the player and the whole batch, and was an amateur trader for a while, then realised that there was a huge range of digital discs I couldn't play. Found someone selling the CLD V2300D cheap (he had about 30, from a publicity company that had gone over to DVD) and gave the LD-V4100 to a charity shop (equivalent to a US thrift shop).

About this time the main British laserdisc manufacturer decided to go over to DVDs and was selling off all its stock very cheaply, so I bought quite a lot. I've since gone over to DVD myself, but still have the player and a hundred or so disks, ranging from SF and action / adventure to opera, and a few films that simply aren't available on DVD, or aren't quite worth the hassle of replacing them, so it still gets used occasionally.

I only got round to cataloguing my discs a week or so ago - I'm in the process of clearing out my flat and getting rid of duplicate books, DVDs, etc., and remembered this site when I decided to sort out the laserdiscs too. I've sent in cover pictures for the disks in my collection that didn't already have them, but they aren't on line yet.

I'm probably not very interested in adding to my collection, or in going into business selling them (unless someone is looking for something really obscure that I don't mind parting with). Although the database says a few of my discs are NTSC, it's wrong - the same manufacturers code was sometimes used for PAL and NTSC discs.

I've written a couple of guides on laserdisc players for eBay UK:

A general look at laserdisc players for the British/European market
http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/Laserdisc-Pla ... 0001285055

A look at the specialised Domesday system
http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/Domesday-Mach ... 0015321762

A site that's useful for anyone in the UK is the UK Laserdisc Archive, which has specs and pictures of hundreds of players, and documentation for many of them.
http://laserdiscarchive.co.uk

Thanks for telling about the domesday system, never seen or heard about it before. How much does that system goes for today ?

Probably a couple of thousand pounds if you could find one, but nearly all were owned by educational institutions and scrapped (often literally) once considered obsolete, since the computers could be used for other things. I haven't seen one on sale in years.

Is this the system used in that one Bond movie? I can't remember which one. It was white.

I think it's in Licence to Kill.

Got to remember it's about 30 years ago, but I'm remembering the laserdisc part of the machine I used as grey with the laserdiscs in big grey and transparent plastic caddies. I could be mixing it up with something else though.