So, I was looking through some local Craigslist ads, & I came across a listing for Panasonic LX-120 units, which I take for a low-end consumer player, although the same advertiser apparently had some CLD-V2400s. One of the photos shows a logo on the right-hand side of the disc tray, the opposite side from the Panasonic, MASH, and MultiLaser logos, which appears to say "distributed by Optical Data Corporation". Now, from what I recall, ODC was the producer of the RLV recordable LD. What's the connexion here?

I happen to know about these players because I held Image stock at the time and they kept us up to speed with frequent updates. Image was planning on introducing a LaserDisc player under their own name - as well as issuing some Hi-Vision titles and releasing a Hi-Vision player - the standard LD player Image chose was the low end Panasonic LX-101 and they bought several thousand of them - for some reason, mostly the industrial versions that could do laser bar code and external PC control. As usual with Image, the plan was not well thought out and their funding fell through, so they quickly looked for a buyer of all the players. ODC bought them and self-branded them and sold them at a low price to frequent users of their RLV service, which worked out well since the player could be computer controlled.

As a side note, Image's abandoned Hi-Vision program is why some copies of Silence Of The Lambs, Deceived (blech!) and Little Man Tate came in the plastic Digi-pack jackets. They had to find some use for all the plastic Hi-Vision disc jackets they bought.

Wow, another completely bass-ackwards Image deal! I really, really wish they had concentrated on the MUSE idea — maybe in partnership with a company which already sold LD players in the USA. What they thought they could achieve by introducing consumer electronics under their own brand name utterly escapes me.

The stupid thing is Image chose a super low-end player, with awful quality, as the player they were going to use to convince consumers to invest in LaserDisc. Just mind-boggling, the stupidity of it. The player appeared in the Image catalog that is devoted to widescreen releases and has an explanation of player features - that's their player shown. I think you have that catalog don't you?

The MUSE plan was stopped by the Japanese government - the HDTV hysteria was mounting and they didn't want anything that looked like the Japanese were doing an end-run around whatever standards were developing in the US.

The really stupid thing on Image's part was the fact that there were NO HD capable sets on the consumer market - projection was available, but at very high cost and even in Japan a 25-inch HDTV for consumers cost over $15,000. Image had so many half-baked ideas. But, I guess that's what you get when your company is filled with and heavily funded by people in the p0rn industry and the mafia.

On the other hand, in Japan MUSE-NTSC converters were selling like hotcakes. Almost every model had a "FULL/WIDE/ZOOM" selector, so you could watch the program either letterboxed or full-height with cropping on your standard TV, or full-frame if you had bought a 16:9 TV (which were beginning to sell). And the surround-sound capability was built right in, no separate AC-3 or dts decoder required. So, instead of having separate-inventory pan-&-scan & letterbox discs, & then leaving the folks with widescreen displays out in the cold, Hi-Vision LD could in principle be a good deal well before penetration of HDTVs became significant.

In other words, all the advantages of DVD except the small size!


Unfortunately, the Japanese pursued a vacillating policy. Part of that was due to the persistent technical problems with the BS-series orbiters, which meant the extra transponders for new channels they had been counting on just weren't available, & made digital multicasting more attractive. A seriously premature announcement about digital broadcasting had a chilling effect on further MUSE development, & then, because the folks with widescreen TVs were clamouring for more content, they sunk a huge amount of effort down the rabbit hole known as ClearVision-II, possibly the only broadcasting scheme weirder than PAL+. And so it goes…

I was given four of these players when the my school desided to get rid of them and they said they bought them the same time they bought the Windows on Science Laserdiscs also distributed by ODC