Just wanted to say thanks for sharing that, really heart warming : )

I cannot say that for where I live...
DVD came rather slow in germany, in 1996 you would have had a hard time finding it.
I had no problem buying LD's (or even renting LD's) in the very same shops I'd frequent since 1993 until the beginning or mid of 1998.
That was when you realized that less and less titles were released while the DVD corners of those shops grew larger and larger.
Fast forward to 2000: Now it was bad. Some of the shops had closed. People did not need specialized shops to buy DVD's, the bought them
at the big electronic stores together with players and TV's and whatnot.
So I call one of the shops I frequently used to order from to place an order for Fight Club on LD.
The guy tells me "What? That title even exists? Call me tomorrow and I'll tell you if it's still available".
So I call the next day: "Nope can't get it. Also ordered 5x End of Days but will only be getting 1".
So I call another shop, which I never ordered from before and here it is like this:
"Sure we can get you Fight Club, but you have to send us a copy of your Identity Card, sign an import contract and pay in advance."
Wow... ok so I did all that and happily received a brand new copy of Fight Club a few weeks later, bought some other late print LD's from
them as they were released. Would you believe I paid 69 german mark for a brand new "The Cell" in 2001? That's like 40$ U.S. or so
And then LD production simply stopped. All you could still order was whatever the shops had in storage. Blow-out sales and things had been
going on for a while, but the discs you still wanted - nobody had. So you had to import them yourself from japan where old stock of factory
sealed discs was still easily available at that time in great variety. That's my story.

Good memories, thanks for sharing.

Agree on that, DVD wasn´t easy to find back then and Laserdisc was still around. Somehow I thought (back then) that maybe DVD will not make it, so I bought some stuff on DVD (import prices) and on Laserdisc (also....import prices). I´d say that Laserdisc had it´s prime here in Germanyfrom 95-1999 (when the sold out started)...

I remember dvd selection was pretty bad for region 2 in early years. Almost everyone who had a dvd player had to import region 1 dvds. No dts for region 2 for many years either. I remember lds disappeared too quickly.

I started updating the Laserdisc article on wikipedia a while back, but never quite finished it. Half finished article is here

This was from a book of statistics - US Laserdisc player sales in Millions of US Dollars. Numbers before 1986 include all 'Videodiscs'.

1993 is probably the peak year, with 1994 being pretty close. Uncertainty about DVD starts hurting player sales after that. Pioneer really did a great job with the format.

Good evening megapixie,

Thank you for taking the time and sharing what you know sir........I appreciate such detail.

Yes completely agree with your the Pioneer comment, if it wasn't for this Company then we would never had seen the Laserdisc Elite players that amaze myself to this day with their build quality.

Pioneers dedication and persistence in driving this fine format to greater heights was evident in all that they did, and to this very day a good number of those that are loyal to Pioneer products......remember the quality reputation that they have built over the years.

Their Laserdisc drive transport was so highly regarded, that the likes of MACKINTOSH / THETA and others used Pioneer proven technology inside their Laserdisc Hardware.

I remember reading the specs on the Pioneer Disc Spindle power, and was amazed at how strong they were WOW! I thought at the time.

The shear fact that they last as long as they do is also in itself amazing so say the least.

I personally believe that if it were not for the Fact that Pioneer took over the baton from the likes of Philips, then the Laserdisc format would have died around the late 1980's, and the Pioneer Laserdisc movie production was perfected by them in bonding quality terms.............Pioneer had fully automated the disc production line in the latter part of the 90's, check out the YOUTUBE on this........AMAZING FOR THE TIME AND EVEN TODAY, THAT THEY HAD ACHIEVED SUCH A FEAT THEN SPEAKS FOR ITSELF.

Sony and others cared not for the exacting standards that the Laserdisc disc production line demanded, and so the issue of disc rot left it's mark, and to some degree gave them a bad name with Laserdisc enthusiast's, who had rotted titles that Sony rarely (well I never heard of anyone receiving a refund with known rotted titles.)

I know that Sony were not the only Laserdisc movie manufacturer to get things wrong, and that Pioneer had some issues, but they KEPT PUSHING ENVELOPE AND BELIEVING IN BETTER AND THAT'S WHAT COUNTS.

Thank you again sir and please take good care of yourself


Kind Regards

If you liked that: you're going to love this. A Japanese history of the laserdisc format, page 62 and 63 have details of sales in the Laserdisc Karaoke market. Page 67 has details of overall sales. Seems like the peek in Japan was 91/92, but the tail off was much more gradual and likely triggered by the end of the 80s economic bubble.

Even if you can't read Japanese, there are some great pictures in there.

I did .
In the Netherlands, Ro-Disc, sold LD's, VHS, dvd's blu-rays.
But they also had racks with dts-cd's (most classical) , sacd and even vcd and games, all in alphabetical order.
The only ones i didn't come across were the 5" cdv's. I guess because they were already sold out earlier via their web page, or else i don't know. I also bought there my first ld player, the cld d515 2nd hand in 2004.


For as about peak moments of ld in the netherlands, i only know the

- Evoluon: where they had laserdisc for show the first moment it came out end 70's/beginning of the 80's (that fashionshow with the lady with her skirt going up ) (I used to live in Eindhoven then and my father worked at the Evoluon and also worked earlier at the NatLab where other people at that same period were developing the laserdisc "beeldplaat"!)

- 80's: Palace 't Loo in Apeldoorn, where they had tv's attached to ld players showing history about the palace.

- End 80's/begin 90's: Those 'golden' 5" cdv's that appeared and also rapidly dissapeared from conventional recordstores.

- In beginning of the 90's: when i and my brother went to karaoke cafes with the laserkaraoke logo on the window.

In those days i never knew of a laserdisc shop though. Thought it was basically a professional only format for musea, exhibitions, karaoke, libraries, schools etc.

I remember that in the 90's i bought my first discman and fantasized about purchasing the Brothers in Arms cdv and lateron ld for when i might be able to purchase a cdv or cld player in the then near future, but the freerecord shops had just got rid of all cdv's a few months earlier. I remember one of the salesmen there showed me a new format, the cdi and/or videocd, but he was far from enthusiastic about it.
(Now i've got a cd/cdv-only player, an ld player and cdv ld discs which i at the time couldn't afford.) )

In the UK Encore Entertainment went bust in 1998 and Pioneer ceased releasing new titles in the summer of 1999. All releases due the remaining of that year were cancelled. America continued with laserdisc until 2000 and in Japan ended in 2002.

In the late 80's there was a new music shop that opened in Belfast called Koinonia Compact Disc Shop.
As the name suggests they specialised in selling CDs - primarily classical and top 40 but could order anything you wanted including imports. They were also involved in attempting to promote the CDV format. Whilst other record shops carried the gold 5" CDVs for a brief promotional period Koinonia stocked some 8" and 12" sized CDVs instore. As CDV flopped in the early 90's Koinonia returned the focus to CD which was really becoming very popular by the mid 90's.

A few other music instrument shops and hi-fi stores stocked LD players during this period. When Virgin Records came to Belfast they also sold some movies on LD during 1995-1996. I don't recall ever seeing any Japanese imports or USA import LDs for sale anywhere at the time. I can imagine if you'd wanted to order something like the Japanese import of "Durutti Column: Domo Arigato - Live in Tokyo" on LD which was released in 1991 it can't have been easy back in the days before the internet as I remember how slow it could be ordering Japanese import CDs and also how expensive it was!

Never remember seeing any LD players on display in shops in the 1990s. HMV in Newcastle(upon Tyne) sold some LDs in the late 1990s. I bought The X-files there on LD. It was the one where Scully got abducted(the episodes when she was heavily pregnant and absent from filming).

Fascinating to see the sharp steady decline in laserdisc player sales up to the mid 80's.
I bet Pioneer were panicking at that stage given how much money they had spent on developing the technology for sales to be going in the reverse direction!

That includes CED players.

Would the chart actually look much different if it didn't?

I got hooked on LDs at my college communications library in 1993, and peak collected between 1993-1996.

I think the the last disc I bought new was Saving Private Ryan, as there was no DVD yet.

I also remember upgrading to a Pioneer 704 in 1996 and the salesmen trying to talk me out of it in favor of waiting for the next big thing, DVDs.

So, my experience seems to match all the curves/graphs.

Very different. CED's outsold LD at least in the US, and there was a knock-on effect where people thought LD died along with CED, from what I heard (I was 8 at the time and about then my parents got a VHS deck to add to their sometimes-flaky Beta deck in 84 )

And welcome to lddb wolfschmidt!

You know if I didn't know better I would say there was a concerted conspiracy to kill off Laser Discs.