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Julien

At least 90 rotters, anyway, yes. You're more or less guaranteed rot with PDO UK. However, I find that a lot of them still play reasonably well, with a gradual softening of the picture. What finally makes them unviewable is when the digital audio goes, and of course there is no fallback to analogue on PAL discs.

Their CDs were just as bad for a while, although they did sort that out eventually. And they had a replacement scheme going for quite a few years. No such luck for LDs though.

It's a real shame because the terrible PDO UK discs tend to contaminate the reputation of all UK-issued discs, whereas a lot of the later ones, especially the PLFxxxx catalogue ones are excellent. A full-frame non-PDO PAL disc is hard to beat for picture quality.

I have some PDO-UK discs... PAL en analogue audio.... Picture is reasonably well, so is the audio, but these are early Philips Proto and demo discs.
All are CAV and a written label.
But the picture quality is not so good as Pioneer PAL discs....

I agree with all of the above. I had the pleasure of using the replacement scheme for their CDs, sending back literally hundreds of PDO manufactured CDs which had turned bronze. This was a very serious problem and I'm just glad I wasn't into collecting laserdiscs back then as it would have been soul destroying to watch them rot with no return policy available.

The only thing I would add is the likelihood of encountering rot is also directly proportional to the quantity of discs you buy. I've 7000 laserdiscs and have hundreds of rotted LDs. Most of these aren't PDO discs because I know to avoid them. They actually cover many different manufacturers from USA, Europe, Japan and Hong Kong. They also cover the entire 25 year period of LD production even promo 8" LDs produced in the early 2000's which were some of the last LDs ever produced!!! So no one is going to tell me this wasn't an issue and you don't need to worry about it. They are ill informed if they think that.

does anyone have this rotter?
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/WILD-GEESE-2- ... 23351a9995

this is one of my alltime favorite mercenary movies
it was recently reliesed on dvd.
does anyone know what aspect ratio is offered on dvd version?

I don't have that disc. I just have a small comment about laser rot: at this point in time, if the disc has a little rot but it's watchable, just chalk it up to it still being better than a vhs tape with all those tracking issues. If it's not super distracting than party on!

Do you ever get the feeling that all LD's are doomed to eventually rot. To some degree I've seen in a short time how rot creeps onto a disc. Some not so obvious but it's there. Oh well, we all are rotters, just a matter of time before we all expire.

Elvis

i just picked up this disc today Steel and Lace (1991) [ID8195FR]
made by PDO-UK for the USA market.
played perfectly with NO rot or even light speckles.

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