Were 8" LDs more expensive to produce versus 12"?

They should have been cheaper, but volume might've played a bit. The LD singles should've been cheaper still.

Yeah, volume plays a big part, but I'll assume they were cheaper since the MSRP is always lower than a comparable 12". Many (maybe most?) were either LaserJukes or promos meaning they were sorta free.

Interesting. Reminds me of the 3" vs. 5" cd singles.
3" cd singles were far less common than 5" cd singles.
But funny fact, nowadays you see a ship load of 3" cd's being used for distributing software for small devices as the 3" cd can fit a smaller package. And then i mean even very cheap devices like keyring photoframes.
So it suprises me why they now can use 3"s easily while in the 90's 5"s were chosen over 3"s.
Or are the software 3"s just 5"s pressed with software and then just punched to 3"?



Do you mean the 5" cdv's or the single sided 8" ld's?

I also wonder in productivity cost where the cdv's would fit in.
Was it a project making use of existing cd plants completely seperated from the ld plants, or was a cd plant installed inside the ld plant, being altered with the video installations added to it?
I know in shops they cost a few bucks more than a normal cd, but contained only a few songs, like a normal cd single, but 2,5 times more expensive than a cd single as 99% of the buyers, like me, never had the opportunity at the time to watch the videopart, nor knowing any neighbours that would have owned an ld player, let alone one that could also playback pcm and cdv's.
I saw them in a cd store next to cd's, without ever seeing ld's around.

CDV-Singles were pressed on standard CD equipment in the same facilities as any other CDs. It was only the mastering process that was different, & required certain modifications to the equipment (but perhaps less than you might think).

So that makes the way free to experiment with cd-r's might one of us can get hold of the equipment, if not destroyed or protected, heavily licensed etc.. (like with sacd, where you can't burn the physical rom mark yourself if you don't have the equipment).

I read in other post that it was kind of a project of yours to be able to try to do that cdv on cd-r and that it would be more feasible than hauling with left over ld-r's or ld equipment.

Somehow... it would be a nice project if it would succeed. And some vsd's look really nice, pq wise.
But ... well for fun. It is cute, but getting up again each time for each video starts to get entiring. With even 8"s you got at least 3 video's on a single sided cav disc.

What would be an approximate estimate of how many 12"s vs how many 8"s vs how many 5"s were produced? (Of course the total years leveled as average per year as 5"s were shortlived)

I'm pretty sure that way over %99.9 of LDs manufactured were 12". Out of the ~600 LDs I own, eleven of them aren't 12", and I actually look for these things specifically. Half the 8"s I have are promos. Out of these two aren't Japanese territory anime releases.

The bulk of 8" discs were produced by Pioneer. There were a handful of titles pressed by PDO-UK, less than a dozen pressed by each Kuraray and Nippon Columbia.

I have 110 8" discs in my library. Here is the breakdown:
3M - 1
Kuraray - 3
Nippon Columbia - 3
PDO UK - 3
Pioneer USA - 63
Pioneer Japan - 37

The 3M disc is an "industrial" disc. Other facilities may have produced limited numbers of 8" discs for the industrial market. I think it was a Pioneer thing for the most part.

A bit of research I did a while back showed that enormous numbers of mostly short runs of 20 cm discs were done for commercial customers, for jukebox & similar not-for-public-release discs. One facility in Japan continued producing them until 2008.

8" CAV is only 7 minutes per side. CLV was 20 minutes per side.

I've over 600 8" LDs in my own collection - almost all of them are music and the vast majority are laserjuke promo titles never commercially available to the public.

I know a guy with a list of those same discs that extends well beyond a 1000 titles so 8" LDs could represent about 2% of all LDs produced (1000 /50000 x 100) and yes they are definitely the last laserdiscs ever produced by some considerable measure.

CAV play is 14 minutes per side on an 8" disc.

I thought it was 14 minutes total both sides?

No, in CAV playtime is determined by the number of concentric tracks, which in turn is determined by the distance between the inner & outer edges of the playing area. Take a ruler & measure that for the 20 cm & 30 cm discs, & you will see that, since the inner radius is about 5 cm, the width of the play zone is about half for the smaller disc what it is for the larger disc (5 vs 10 cm). Thus the playing times must be in the same proportion, & since a 30 cm CAV disc plays half an hour, a 20 cm CAV disc must play about a quarter of an hour.

I stand corrected then but I thought the futher out from the centre the longer the groove(I forget what it is called) or surface area?

Track length is important for CLV discs, but not for CAV discs. That is what the terms refer to : the CLV disc plays at a constant linear tracking speed, while the CAV disc plays one frame per rotation.
At its outer play limit, the 30 cm CLV disc spins at 1/3 its speed at the inner play limit, or 600 RPM, because the circumference (track length) at the outermost track is 3 times the innermost circumference, & 3 frames can be written there. The average play speed is thus 1/2 that of a CAV disc, & so the play time is double. On a 20 cm disc, the outer circumference is only 2 times the inner circumference, so the average play speed is not reduced by much, & the the difference between CAV & CLV playtimes is proportionally less.

I am sure what you say is correct but CLV was abandoned around 1982 in favor of CAA but the term CLV stuck.

"CAA" represents a minor tweak to the CLV technique. From a practical standpoint, it works the same way. As with phase modulation & frequency modulation, the distinction is important only in very restricted contexts.

CLV is where the disc starts at 1800/1500 rpm and slows down gradulary to 600rpm where as CAA works similar to how your DVD/Blu-Ray burner works at burning disc in higher speeds, a 16x speed disc doesn't burn at 16x speed all through the disc but only at the outer edges(or it is the inner edge?).

You are confusing different things.
A high-speed "burner" runs at approximately constant angular velocity (CAV), so that it increases its "writing speed" as it moves outward, reaching the highest multiplier at the outer radius. It can do this precisely because the CD/DVD/BD is a CLV product, that is, (approximately) constant track length per unit of information recorded.