Great thread! Found a Panasonic DMR-ES15 DVD recorder for 7 bucks on Saturday. Picked it up for the comb filter and my CLD-99!

I think the DMR-ES15 has the same comb filter that the DMR-ES25 (which I have) has. It's a decent 3D comb filter, but you will want to compare the results from it and from the 3D comb filter in your CLD-99.

From what I've seen, the ES25 is great with dot crawl, good with cross-color, but tends to darken the image a bit.

I noticed the same thing. It does darken it a bit but otherwise looks pretty good.

Dropped by the thrift store and saw this beauty. Nice DVL-909.

I was only able to check the CD function, and it played, so I assumed it probably worked all around and bought it.



Looks like something heavy was dropped on it at one point, I took the cover off and bent it back into shape the best I could without hammering it flat.



Great picture, it seems a little better than my S104. I actually prefer the more angular design to the curvier one of my S104.

A/B function works, it needs a little more cleaning but overall I'm happy! Inside is nice and clean though.



Depth is the only issue, my S104 sat flush with the cabinet.

$45, a tad high for a thrift store unit, but IMO I got a great deal all things considered. Still no remote though.

Went to a car boot sale (swap meet) last Sunday and got all of the following for a total of £9

A Displayport - Displayport cable (looks like it can also do Thunderbolt, I don't actually have any need for it at present but it's worth keeping)
A USB joystick.
An HDMI to 2 x VGA monitor adapter
A weird adapter with ten phono plugs to one D25 plug, which I posted about a few days ago.
A folding aluminium magnifying glass
An early Apple iPod charger with a firewire 400 socket.
An earthing strap for electronics work
A YBR video to SCART adapter
An HP iPaq phone with a USB charging / data transfer cradle - unfortunately the battery is dead and the Wifi is too early for modern security protocols, but still probably worth a pound or two on eBay
And a nice Victorian book about London stories and legends

And yesterday I picked up a 250gb network multimedia player for a tenner in Portobello Road market, just testing it and it seems to work perfectly.

Thursday at one of the Goodwills I got a bunch of PS2 games for $5.09 each (after my handy senior discount):

Arc the Lad Twilight of the Spirits
Dark Angel
Demon Stone
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy XII
Final Fantasy X-2
Gauntlet
Jak and Dexter
Jak II
Kingdom Hearts: The Chain of Memories
Maximo
Okage Shadow King
One Piece Grand Battle
Oni
Onimusha
Orphen
Ring of Red
Resident Evil 6
Shaman King
Twisted Metal Black

And one PS1 game (the only one they had) - Scooby Doo Cyber Chase

While I find PS2 games fairly often it is unusual to find so many good ones at once.

A couple of week ago my market bargain was a Huawei wireless modem hotspot thingy like this:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEWUNLOCKED-H ... 51d1c9d563

Which I got for a pound. I've got an unlocking code for it, and some time in the next month or so a free phone service called Freedompop is starting up in the UK. I think this is going to be very useful for the odd occasions when I'm travelling and need to use my iPad somewhere that doesn't have WiFi.

Today's bargain was an old 14" iBook G4 for £12 (about $18); works but there's no battery, which would cost around £20. I suspect that my best bet is to take it apart and sell the bits - 14" iBook keyboards are like gold dust these days, you just can't get them any more.

Today I went to a fete (outdoor thing with games, stalls etc. to raise funds) at the school where I used to work. Nothing particularly wonderful, but they did have some cheap DVDs and I ended up getting

The Losers
The Complete Fingerbobs (a children's TV show which my sister's grandkids will love)
The Complete Bod (ditto)
Fast and Furious 6
and a Sharpe boxed set, 14 episodes with two specials.

I paid £4 for the lot, which I was rather pleased about, though I did have to pay £2 to get in and didn't find anything else I wanted.

Then I went on to a charity shop near there, which I've only visited once since I retired. And found four PAL laserdiscs! Unfortunately they weren't particularly wonderful ones, and when I asked it turned out they were priced at £5 ($7.50) each which seemed a bit excessive. So I made "thanks anyway" noises, and they promptly said I was the only person who'd ever looked at them, and offered them to me for a pound each! I ended up giving them a fiver, since I didn't want to be mean, then found another disk and gave them £2 for that, since it was Ghost, which I know I don't have in any format. So for £7 I ended up getting:

Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994)
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995)
Face/Off (1997)
Sneakers (1992)
Ghost (1990)

Sneakers is a duplicate - I thought I had the NTSC version but that's PAL too - so I'll probably give the duplicate to another charity shop to get back some karma. Not a bad haul anyway.

Finally bought a receiver today. I'm tired of waiting for an AC-3 capable model and I only have two movies with AC-3 anyway, so I nabbed a nice looking one for $35.





Definitely catches the eye more than the 909. I have both S/PDIF (PS3) and digital coax (LD) cables on order from Monoprice, and now I need some DTS LaserDiscs.

I picked up a Retron2 in the original box (a bit battered but not bad) for $10. Doesn't look to have been used since the cords and controllers are still sealed in plastic. Not a super great deal but not bad either.

http://www.amazon.com/Hyperkin-RetroN-N ... ds=retron2

Picked this up recently:









It is a full size tablecloth.

The photos don't do it justice - the colors are much nicer. I am guessing late fifties to mid sixties - no way to tell for sure.

On Friday I went to Portobello Road market and happened to spot a fairly bulky lens on a stall that sells old cameras and retro junk. So I took a look at it, and it turned out to be rather interesting. If you're not into photography this won't mean much, but if you are...

It's a 50mm lens... A Carl Zeiss T* Planar 50mm f1.2 lens... With a Nikon mount, with the electronic contacts for use on digital Nikons. It's manual focus, but everything else links to the camera electronics. They mostly sell to professional photographers for portrait work, if you want to buy one new you probably won't get much change from £500.

There's a snag, of course - there's a teeny scratch right in the middle of the rear element. So far I've taken about 25 photos with it and can't see much evidence that it's affecting anything.

It cost me £10 ($15.18). This is like paying a tenner for one of the best laserdisc players ever made, and I am rather happy about it.

later - I obviously can't read; the Zeiss lens is f1.4, not f1.2, the model number ends in .2 and I must have somehow translated that in my mind as 1.2

Never mind, it's still an extremely good lens.

The Zeiss lens eventually sold for £151! Fairly pleased about that, not least because it's now nearly 3 weeks since I sold it and too late to return it.

More photographic stuff in a couple of charity shops since then - a Nikon zoom and an old Russian lens - which I've also sold on for modest profits, and a broken GoPro Hero 2 which I'm currently selling for parts, but nothing truly remarkable.

So on Saturday I went to a car boot fair (swap meet) and found an Apple USB keyboard (the recent metal one), an elderly Apple mouse, and a couple of Apple cables, which I got for £7.50
and on Sunday I went to another and found an old iMac G4, the 20" version which is extremely rare in the UK - for £10! It's in very good condition, I'm going to put in a big hard drive and more RAM and sell it on, hopefully for another hundred or so.

VERY pleased with this run of luck.

found this at my local GOODWILL for $1.99. never actually seen the film,
and honestly don't have more than a passing interest in watching it, but in any case i figured i'd go ahead and pad my LD collection a little.

i mean, it IS just about the earliest LD release i've owned yet...

Patton is more a character study of a man than a war movie. He definitely spurred his troops to the highest level of morale to defeat the enemy.

might be kind of interesting then.

i mean, i DO like war movies every so often, but the vast majority made tend to be rather repetitive.

well, providing the discs aren't rotted or anything, i suppose it would be an excuse to give my player
a bit of exercise whilst finally seeing a classic film i've managed to completely avoid for near 34 years now...

Another vote for Patton, it's a very interesting film.

.....& another vote for it.

This is much more than your average war movie.

It is very well made & George C. Scott is superb in the role.

Definitely worth powering up your player for.

On a side note,

Patton is burried In Luxemburg (near Belgium)

https://www.abmc.gov/cemeteries-memoria ... jmjwPkveM8

Went to visit it myself a year or two ago.

Love chasing WW2 history

Patton: Special Edition (1970) [0414885] version has the AC-3 soundtrack created from the original 6-track recording.