Hello to everyone. My name is Andrew and I'm from Melbourne Australia. My introduction to laserdiscs came in the late nineties. While looking at the dvd players at my favorite Shop at the time, JB Hif, I noticed these large pioneer machines with a couple of racks of movies next to them. Very expensive and way out of my price range. Hell it stretched the budget buying a $500 teac dvd player. Well dvd had a superior picture and was the way of the future so I quickly forgot about laserdisc, but I remember the sleeves and artwork being very cool.
Fast Forward to a month or so ago and I was contemplating how sh1t the original Star wars trilogy had become because I know for a fact that Han shot first. While cursing George Lucas I looked up how to watch the pre molested version. One was on laserdisc. I started watching culture Dog on YouTube and so my interest was rekindled. I started going to trash and treasure and tip shops looking to find a player but no luck. I find however find a milk crate full af discs for between 5 to 15 bucks. All NTSC. I grabbed a few, including apocalypse now, interview with the vampire, and the abyss pizza box. Players are regularly listed on ebay but not often in my state. And I wouldn't want to ship something so fragile cross country. Found a Kenwood k5100 Close to me which I bought for 40 bucks. Will do for starters, though it's not the best and can't find any info on it. Will Post on it in the hardware section later. Fired it up and was disappointed with the quality, but was realistic about what to expect.
I'm looking forward to talking laserdiscs with you guys!

Welcome to LDDb!

I'm actually visiting Melbourne on vacation this coming November

Julien

Melbourne is awesome for LDs on gumtree I found during my 5 years living there. I bought 50 hong kong laserdiscs for $5 a piece out of the back of a car at a suburban train station there at 10 at night thanks to gumtree

Good evening miffotron,

UK here.......... A good read Thank you for your time in sharing with us all here.

The Star Wars Originals & the later CGI additional footage is a delicate subject and for good reason.

Take care

Kind Regards

Also I was lucky enough to be able to raid an asian video store in Springvale that still had a half dozen dusty LD boxes on the floor at the back of the store a couple of times. Sadly it turned into a cafe a couple of years back.

There was also a cult video store (mostly VHS) in the city that had a few boxes of (mostly overpriced) LDs. That closed a couple years back too now.

Your best bet for actual stores now is Dixons in Fitzroy and Blackburn. The Blackburn store is pretty huge and had a few dozen LDs for good prices last I was in.

Trevor Lees the eccentric hi fi guy in Kew had a couple hundred LDs behind the counter once and sold me a dozen for $1 each, remarking that DVD has been around for a while now haha