Never seen one of these before ... looking!.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Runco-LJR-II-THX-Super-Laserdisc-LD-Player-MINT-/170744787110?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item27c12eb0a6

I've had one before for a short time. It's built like a tank, weighing like 40lbs or so. It's a Panasonic LX-900u under the hood with some tweaks by MSB Technologies.

It's a good player, but for the price those fetch on Ebay these days, I'd rather invest in a CLD-97 or LD-S2.

Our 'good' friend cararte is selling it.

Funny how just about everything he sells he previously boasted he would never buy!

Checkout the following comment made by him on AVS forum in 2007:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1203258

In it he openly states:

I won't even consider the american models, like Runco LJR (waste of money, no parts available and picture not that great comparing to the X9 of course), Mcintosh...etc... because the X9 has the best comb filter 3D and superb built.

His previous comments are all coming back to haunt him.

I've had one of these as well. Good player. Color rendition was good. I had it hooked up to a loewe CRT. Great PQ for what it was. Although, what the seller is asking imho is too high. You might as well just save a few hundred more and invest in an X9 or X0. I did a direct comparison between my X0 and the LJR-II and it really was no comparison, hands down X0 wins in every category: detail, low noise, color rendition. I'm not sure if it will sell for that kind of money, but you never know. Like the saying goes..a fool and his money...

Save yourself plenty and get almost (but not quite) the same thing by picking up an Panny LX900 or the just as good LX1000u prism. Few would notice much difference except for a zero bank account balance.

Never saw a fellow before that was so into promotion on a scale rivaling PT Barnum.

Reminds me of a chap I stumbled upon who resided in South America.
I outbid him on a music laserdisc about 6 years ago on Ebay when I had just started collecting laserdiscs.
This was in the days when you could see the full username of other bidders on an item in the bidder history just before Ebay changed the rules.
He was able to use this to contact me and he mentioned he was a passionate music fan and how wonderful and special the laserdisc format was.
He told me about how many years he had spent locating rare titles in his collection. It all sounded very genuine at the time and he seemed to know
all the big players in the laserdisc world whose names crop up on this forum regularly.

Two weeks later guess what?
He was offloading his entire music laserdisc collection on Ebay!
He literally could not sell it fast enough. He would not sell individual items and wanted me to buy his entire collection by sending him money directly in the post!
He would not accept payment via paypal. Needless to say I declined his offer.

Two months later the same bloke was then selling dubbed DVD copies of some of the rarer music laserdiscs he had previously sold from his collection.
I contacted him and he said the laserdisc format was for losers - it was plagued with laser rot problems and he was getting rid of them all and moving to blu-ray etc.
As he was listing them from South America he got away with it as Ebay copyright infringement legislation there seems to be non existent.
He literally sold dozens of the same rare dubbed titles over and over again and Ebay completely ignored what he was doing.
This all from a so called fan of the laserdisc format.

I could hardly believe how he had changed his tune so fast.

I expect Cararte will be telling everyone online how terrible the MUSE versions of Back to the future triology were 5 minutes after he sells them to some unsuspecting collector having previously told the world how wonderful they were!

Ebay has always been slow to stop copyright infringement, even in the USA. They usually only jump when some mouthpiece in Hollywood squawks.

But Hollywood is no angel when it comes to theivery behind the scenes. A few cases get noticed, like the suit against Battlestar Galactica ages ago, but very few. In general, copycat scripts and outright stealing are all over the place. Then they whine about others who might be duping, what hypocracy.

What Hollywood execs really love is when there's no copyright or the copyright has expired or they can grab some story that is considered public property because of the notoriety. That's why you see remake after remake, and adaptations galore of the classic novels, and all sorts of real-life dramatizations. For a while it seemed that one could predict exactly what story Law & Order was going to do just by looking at the most notorious headline of the week before.

The most recent disgusting "theft" was the Disney redo of Dickens' Christmas Carol. While not an outright theft, since it is public domain, it was disgusting because they titled it Disney's Christmas Carol, with nary a word nor reference at the start to Dickens. That's theft to me.

I actually purchased my EAD player off him over a year ago. When he listed the Runco and i think the CLD97 player he did email me letting me know the auctions were online. I replied saying he was charging too much for those players. No one will pay nearly £2000 for a Runco. If people want to spend over £1000 on a LD player it would be a LD-S9 or a MUSE player. He has reduced the CLD-97 in half the last couple of months.

$1,000 for a single title?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/170767238667



TLK

Awesome looking player but I really doubt he will get that kind of money for that player....

For anyone who loves the LX-900U, Runco had it modified and defeated the Video AGC circuit. But after seeing a HLD-X0 in action I'll say that it's non-DNR picture equals the LD-S2 (the S2 is lower noise than the Panasonic and all other US Pioneer models) but the DNR in the X0 really reduces the noise to the smoothest looking analog picture I've seen. The DNR in the 704/79/99/S9/X9 has a digital look to it. This shows the importance of getting the low noise source before using DNR. If you are going to spend big money and don't need a dual sided player I would be shocked if you ever looked back after owning a X0.