The very first laserdisc I ever bought suffered from laser rot
Still this was not enough to put me off the format for life - I persevered.

There was a certain excitement wondering if the next LD I paid mega $$$ for would actually play or not!
No other format delivers this rush of hope and despair simultaneously.
I suspect everyone who collects LDs has a few laser rot stories to tell.
I am no different.

The Gloria Estefan US LD that was so bad the audio sounded like a helicopter taking off - thank you Sony DADC!

The 10+ copies of Olivia Newton-John TV Special I had to buy to get one copy where both sides on the same disc played perfectly - thank you Discovision!

The 20+ copies of almost any PVLM* series title I had to buy to get one side to play perfectly, never mind both sides on the same disc! - thank you Pack In Video!

The early UK PAL laserdiscs whose sides were so badly stuck together with water based glue the two sides actually separated - thank you PDO UK!

The other early PAL laserdiscs which you could see right through the disc if you held them up to a light - little wonder the LD player was having difficulties playing them as the signal surface had eroded completely - thank you PDO UK again!!

I was curious to see how bad SONY DADC actually did. Since all the mint markings are in the same format LDxx-<6-digit sequential number), I can easily extract the sequence number and list them ordered (old releases at the top, most recent at the bottom).

Here is the link (generated on spot, not an archive):

SONY DADC - Slowly We Rot

And the format:

Thanks for bringing this subject up.
"Every silver lining has a touch of Grey"
to quote a great song......
Would like to see more input on this subject from other users regarding bad eggs....

Stay away from these... or be very cautious and have them tested before buying:

http://www.lddb.com/laserrot.php

You never know what you gonna find.

For example, Starship Troopers is # 5 of Top 100 but I have a clean copy in my collection,
and I even managed to sell an other one for $20 on LDDB, without any complaints from the buyer.

Same thing for my Air Force One, # 6 but clean as a whistle.

One thing about laserrot, a lot of people think a crappy transfer is laserrot. I have a copy of Lair of the White Worm that is just a bad transfer. No rot at all, however, just on the surface you might think it is. I have my copy of copycat for reference. Jees, is that one bad.

how about those rolling dropout things? what causes that?

The worst thing is when you sell a copy on eBay and then double check it and find it has the rot. Happened to me with "Underwater!" It was still watchable but talk about your speckles! I warned the buyer about it, but he still wanted it, and I told him to send it back for a full refund if he was unhappy, but never heard from him again. Like I wrote somewhere in my listings, sometimes even with speckling, laser discs can still look a lot better than VHS tapes, with their glitches and dropouts!




J

those rolling dropouts that you are talking about are caused by imperfections of the disc (dirt, scratches...)

Julien, correct me if I'm wrong

It could but more often it's due to "crosstalk". If the optic block is not properly aligned and follows perfectly the change of rotation of discs in CLV mode, you can misread the beginning of the next frame as the end of the previous one. It gives these famous "rolling bars".

I've seen bad crosstalk on a slightly warped DTS disc. Weirdly the HLD-X9 would give up around 40mn while the LD-S9 was perfectly happy with it till the end of the side!

Julien

i think yazorin means this artifact, right ? (tried to reproduce quickly in photoshop)



this is something different then a rolling bar problem...
i'm sure lots of you have seen this before.
am i correct that this is the result of a tiny imperfection on the disc ?
these white stripes are always horizontal and appear in a blinking and rolling vertically fashion over the screen.
It all is visible for less then a second, in general.

Those are dropouts. They are typically due to a pressing flaw in which one pit, or a few adjacent pits, on the data layer are missing. Sometimes this is due to damage to the master, in which case the same flaw can be seen on several copies of the disc.
A small defect of this kind will be concealed by the "dropout compensator", which takes a sample from the previous line, but with larger defects this may not suffice. Typically the more noticeable ones occur as a little spot on the disc, affecting several adjacent frames ; because CLV discs have the frames slightly misaligned with each other, the spot will appear to move a few lines. On a CAV disc, the spot would appear in the same place on the screen over the course of a few frames, but the problem is less, because the pits are larger except at the inner edge, so any given size flaw has less effect.

great info, thanks !

Sadly the rolling dropouts were not just limited to that now defunct entity Enron....
Thanks for the added thoughts here....(again !)
very grateful for this insightful information......

My copy of copycat shows me exactly what bad laserrot is, lol. It is the light laserrot and the crappy transfer that always messes me up. Especially when there is no noise reduction.

I have one 8" (thin type) LD that has some intermitent speckle things on the last couple tracks. The disc itself looks fine, but the jacket even though it still has the shrinkwrap on looks like it has a water stain mark just on the bottom corner. So that part of the disc must have got wet at some time, which is effecting it.

As to the 5" CDV discs. From the few I have, the ones made in Japan (including usa ones) are fine, but I have 2 made by PDO UK that have rot, but it's only on the video tracks though and not the audio tracks. I thought 5" CDV were immune to rot? but I guess not.

I understand that Philips UK made ordinary Audio CDs that rotted, & I imagine those CDVs were contemporaneous. It's something that can happen to any optical disc format.

Very true. Appears to me like many LD(s) were transferred directly from less than perfect film prints. Speckles that show up in the LD title logo sequence are dead giveaways to me. Personally, I like old Black & White 35mm film prints with all the scratches and dirt that fly through the film ... gives me a feeling to sitting in a theater back in the day.

There are also picture flaws resulting from dropout on the master tapes.

Yep, So, we have all these issues to contend with and when there is any flaw what so ever most people go, oh, its laserrot.