I haven't seen this posted here and thought it might be interesting to some. It’s a Japanese video guide to all areas of life with very nice covers. The disks themselves vary a bit in terms of presentation, but they generally have an introduction by someone who was famous at the time followed by actors recreating certain scenarios as short videos. These are interspersed by many pages of text and images, in the style of early multimedia encyclopaedias.
What a terrific time capsule. The case is amazing. I wonder what the market was for this. Did some sort of consultancy loan them out to helpless dorks and international travelers? Reference and retail both seem like a stretch for a box that had to have cost a grand.
People talk about capturing LDs here all the time but this seems like the rare thing actually worth doing.
I wouldn’t rule out retail actually – they come from a time when the country was awash with new rich, many of whom I’m sure were trying to increase their status in society. I can imagine the set being advertised on TV or in a magazine potentially? I’d love to find out more about it.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of the content they would be a bit tricky to capture, but I could do the video sections once I get setup.
Fairly related - this just arrived today: Pioneer '91 VIP convention
Documentation of a company holiday. Presumably only for top ranking (50+, male) Pioneer staff, or maybe the staff of companies that worked with Pioneer.
I'll get it digitised as soon as I'm able to do so.
It was common to have ads on videos in stores in Japan and elsewhere…still is. LD was much much less popular for this purpose though. It could also have been a contest giveaway I suppose. It has a very retail looking cover made to appeal to…someone. The text on the back seems to imply it was for store owners, but as you say, quite a retail looking cover.
The new TV commercial for Whitehorse 8 is Issei Ogata, a popular talent with his own one-man play, appears. I will play a lovable office worker who laughs off restructuring, pretends to be a master of love, and gets excited about a small promotion. In other words, each and every customer you see in your store is the main character. It will surely become a topic of discussion, saying, "Oh, it's about me." Complete recording of 5 short control commercials.
In this day and age you really should be looking to cash in, its pretty much a loss leader to go after LDs now.
I'm very ok making a loss on old media! The discs only interest me when they have content that isn't available elsewhere, which very often seems to be the case (movies excluded of course). Even if someone has taken the time to upload it to YouTube the digital compression is often bad enough to make it barely watchable.
This one is a bit weird – two discs of photos of buildings, 59,000 yen when new (about 400 usd). Not sure why it was seen as preferable to have this database on disc rather than in books where they could have been far higher res.
One use-case is that you could put it on a TV for a whole classroom to look at without needing a bunch of copies of the book.
Did it come with a booklet with scannable barcodes for navigation?
I have a feeling this is more for an architect's office rather than a classroom - there isn't really very much to learn from these low res building pics. There's no booklet, I think the navigation info is on the disk itself. Perhaps it felt a bit high tech to show clients a info on a screen?
I’ve just moved from a CLD-99S to a CLD-959 and while there certainly is an improvement it’s not enough that you’d notice without careful checking of captures.
I think these days what you do after the player (in terms of scaling, noise reduction, external comb filtering etc) will make a much bigger difference to the end result than the player itself in most cases.
It makes sense however that differences were exaggerated previously. It was hard for most non pro reviewers to objectively compare a large number of players and as with most equipment like this there is a strong desire to upgrade and get the ‘best’. No one getting into any hobby wants to hear that the majority of the equipment involved is good enough and that the diminishing returns are so intense that you’d be better off spending your money enjoying some nice dinners.
It would be nice to see some good captures of a large sample of players playing the same content with the same capture setup, but not sure how that could happen unless someone has a really large player collection.
Thanks list