I think I like Anonyme, I never liked a French person before. However in the last post I think he's bagging out the US of A? I don't like that.



Good point, I've heard of the concept of using 3D printers to make spare parts years before in forums but I don't think anyone has actually done it. Perhaps there isn't a need at the moment as multiples of the same player can still be harvested for parts.



Interesting..



I had one friend agree to watch 2001 and he wasn't that impressed. Refuses to watch anything on LD a second time. He can't see at all why I get so excited about LDs.

Another friend was blown away by the THX audio in Star Wars. But I think he put it all down to my speakers. He has 7 kids and can only hang out once a year. Usually on my birthday.

You are missing a huge element about Blu Ray pressings and that is the changes to the color timing and Digital Noise Reduction. Laserdisc is often mastered off the original film prints with no color time changes and little digital noise reduction. What you end up seeing is something relatively close to what you would have seen in a movie theater in the 80s (dim projector bulb and all). With Blu Ray you are getting new 2012 and later color timing to appeal to the casuals who buy Blu Rays at Target. They sometimes will change the look of the film to give it a more modern feel. If you look at Raiders of the Lost Ark, the color timing is completely gold washed on the Blu Ray. It may look crisp and clear on your OLED set but it is not correct to it's original presentation. It's true that Blu Ray is capable of producing a more accurate picture to a 35mm print but great remasters of older films are incredibly rare. Lawrence of Arabia is one Blu Ray that makes any older version unwatchable. I would also say 2001 A Space Odyssey is another blu ray that is spectacular. But for the most part the older films suffer some kind of remastering that hurts the film.

Disney is the worst offender in my opinion of changing their films to fit Blu Ray. They scrub away all of the film grain and make the picture look like it just aired on Disney Channel. For a 9 year old kid it looks great but for someone who knows what those films should look like they are unwatchable. And of course there is Predator on blu ray with its famous use of noise reduction.

For new films shot on HD cameras I agree Blu Ray is the way to go. But for older films from the 90s and before I think you would be surprised how more accurate laserdisc is picture wise despite its limitations.

I have a number of Disney Blurays and even more LDs. Please tell me which ones are unwatchable because it's never been a problem for me.

When people go on like this I think that before anything is said you have explain where you are coming from and what is a "true" presentation to you. A lot for you guys seem to have a real love for analog defects. I say "defects" because they vary so much depending on when and where you saw the movie.

Because I mainly hung out in the 2nd run circuit a lot of movies I watched as a kid were very well loved. Scratches, missing sections, hair, dust, etc. If I had seen it in its 1st run it wouldn't look like that. Even if I had, it would still be a high speed mass production print like most people saw. The director's personal print would look much better. Even so, if you made a master from original negs instead of duplicates it would be even cleaner. The opening credits in many movies are a generation down because of the old fashioned way they used to lay titles over existing footage. This goes on and on and on. Could have used 70mm. Coulld have used more light. Could have used better stock, rented a better camera. Removing jitter...oh man, that cleans up things a LOT. There's no end.

So when a BR is made they usually make a new inter from the highest quality source and scan it in such a way that there is almost no jitter. If the only version you ever saw of Hundra (just an example, every available version is horrible) was an LD then just making a new inter alone is going to remove %90 of that "natural grain", so what does that mean?

So many people say that LD "preserves the look of film" and I can only say that this is pure crap. Composite video looks NOTHING like film. Not only does it have a fraction of the picture information it brings it's own issues like dot crawl, and rolling dropouts which add to the fogginess.

The thing that LD actually "preserves" is the era of beat up prints and crappy masters. That's the actual thing Forper and X22 are actually in love with. The actual LD-ness of things is irrelevant. They don't like "film", they don't even know what it's capible of. They love NTSC/PAL. This is funny since when SD video was the only thing available and we could all clearly see how bad it sucked nobody complained about how terrible Far and Away looked in 70mm.

And while bad BDs certainly exist they are honestly, from my experience, far less common than bad LDs. I have TONs of bad LDs. The Cinemadisc collection alone...man those are gnarly prints.

signofzeta, you bring up some great points. Let me address one or two.

Film grain existed on prints that were fresh from the lab. They were absolutely noticeable even on good 35mm presentations. That's why when you see a film from 1950 with zero grain it looks wrong.

Have you seen Fantasia on Blu Ray? It's super bright and pristine. Zero film grain. A completely digital presentation. In fact it's too pristine. If you were in a theater in the 1930s watching Fantasia it would not look like that at all. It's been scrubbed to an extreme degree and probably recolored. The Fantasia DVD which has a "messier" print looks more correct to the original theatrical presenation. It's dirtier but I'd take a dirtier print over a completely artificial presentation anyday.

The Little Mermaid on Blu Ray is a similar example. It doesn't look like an animated movie from 1988. It's been completely recomposited digitally. Zero film grain. The picture looks extremely crisp but does it look like film? Absolutely not.

Are they watchable? Yes but in terms of what is the closest to the presentation of the original theatrical release those Blu Rays are not it. Blu Ray provides an amazing picture and is capable of capturing more information at the 2k and 4k levels to give you what is on the original 35 mm film. But the studios aren't doing preservation or very few are. They are changing the films for the modern audiences who buy Blu Rays. That's my point. They're changing the films from their original presentations.

There are fans who are doing their own preservation high definition edits to try and preserve the correct color timing on films. They are trying to correct what the studios are messing up on the Blu Ray releases. They take the Blu Ray or hidef cable presentation, recolor them and make them more correct while giving us a 1080p picture. Originaltrilogy.com has a community devoted to it.

I do like Criterion Blu Rays alot because they preserve what is on the 35 mm print and don't mess with it. I'd recommend any Criterion Blu Ray but they are the exception to the rule.

Those Criterion Blu Rays are absolutely fantastic. They look and sound great.

THIS IS IT! This is what I've been trying to say.

Blu Ray is made for the mass market of idiots who don't know anything about movies. It's 9.99 Blu Rays that normal idiots will think will make them elite. "Oooh Bru Way good, Bru Way MAX RESOLUTION, MAX PIXELS, Bru Way good, what LD? LD haha." - THAT is your typical Blu Ray buyer, that's who the studios are trying to make happy and buy more blu rays.

LD was made for actual high end purists who were willing to PAY. People won't pay for anything now. They just want well marketed junk at junk prices.

At the TV store:

"I want the best, my budget is $1500" then expect the salesman to worship them for their elite purchase.

Actually the best TV IS probably only $1500 these days because that's what people think buys the best. That's the 2016 consumer - a cheap idiot.

Hi,

Here what you wanted:
Pictures of the new part:
http://hpics.li/382c414
http://hpics.li/d50d8f8
I have 3 other ones as the dealer are selling them grouped. Fell free to ask one if needed!
Pictures of the old repaired part:
http://hpics.li/a180ce9
http://hpics.li/4196514

forper and some other are seeing the light. Happy to read that i read in the last post. Once again a victory on the LD.
if the LD was so bad, there were no people coming here to told us to go to digital!
And yes vinyl, is and will be ever the best sound in the world for 200$ the installation and it's in life, so don't forget to buy 1 vinyl by month.

Also, one last thing, i thing adding grain to the new production on the Blueray add a lot, unfortunately due to heavy signal cut, and the square pixel, it will never ever be a like a really film grain, or perhaps at 16K... and even with this it' will be an emulation...
Regarding the ability to retain quality of 35mm. Not even think of it in 2k. In 4K you are close of the bader ones. 8K is the minimum to retain the standard quality 35mm. And the best ones need 16K. It's impossible to have 8k as 4k as it's just as heavy to decode, as a truck which drive on ascent... In fact, the digital is at it's limits, so the next step is to reduce data, increasing the resolution to avoid aretefacts of signal cut, and so on, aye aye aye, the same things, i've seen with the pictures on computer in the 90's... nothing natural ...

Good new, a/b working again....

Rgds,

Wow... I mean I know most of us LD-collectors is a bit insane but this is just... Yeah I really don't know what to say other than I guess Good Luck crazy french dude.

An odd thread, but one that brings up some interesting things. Digital formats are better in many ways, and I often found things like chroma noise on LD very annoying compared to the clarity of even a compressed, downloaded file of the same content. Philosophically though, a closer analysis of the matter touches on some significant meaning in the epistemology of perception. Events occur, prima facie**in analog time/space (**digital physics says the universe may be discrete, but that debate is ongoing). Functions on continuous domains have infinite precision, and indeed there are still advantages to the almost forgotten analog computation (e.g. differential analyzers) of ancient times because of the finite precision of discrete computation. As Zeno's paradox once stated, you can never traverse an interval from point A to point B because infinite points lay in the interval. Noise, however, becomes an enemy to the ideal analog machine-be it in the form of mechanical friction in Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer or the entropy which creeps into the tubes and circuits of analog electronic computers and our beloved laserdisc.

The precision of discrete representations of the analog continuum cannot be infinite-something must be left out. Vinyl, LD, and tape (even lowly VHS) present us with records of continuous data which would require infinite bits of precision to map one-to-one to a true digital record. Perhaps this has something to do with the ascription of "warmth" given analog formats, which is a largely ineffable predicate irreducible to cold, hard numbers. The neurological basis of perception shows us how fine discrimination is attained with rough instruments like the eye (c.f. infamous defect of retina wiring running right through the center) through substantial processing in the brain, and perhaps this apparatus grasps things-like multiple analog harmonics forming new percept "notes"-by virtue of long evolved pathways for dealing with noise. LD noise has driven me nuts at times, but sometimes it feels like something interesting is going on beneath the surface that's hard to pin down. Maybe NTSC's compression mode is akin to the non-linear response curves of tube amps in distorting in occasionally pleasing modes, as opposed to the blatant horror of artifacts like macroblocking (gone thanks to high bandwidth bluray et al.-a real benefit of Moore's law with no parallel in analog, as we see with monumental efforts needed to wring smaller improvements from LD like the HLD-X0).

I wonder if developments in fields like nanoscale engineering might lead to an analog renaissance which could solve the problem of noise, and enable something like a Super-Laserdisc capable of perfect high definition fidelity (not anything like our LD, of course, but such a signal on some analog media which may as well be optical). Anyways, those old tapes, films, records, and LDs are worth having as they constitute unique records of things which cannot have a perfect isomorphism onto a digital representation. This doesn't necessarily equal better, as this stuff can often look and sound terrible, but I feel safe in saying "different" as my above "proof" for the claim of analog "suchness" has thus been shown Q.E.D.

x22, I've always seen the light. It's others that have been put back in the dark ages with clever marketing by "DIGITAL IS GOOD" hype.



I like your thinking, Captain.

If we're going to start manufacturing discs and players again we should definately go with the MUSE Hi-Vision format or a successor to it. MUSE SUPER HI-VISION

LD was made for high end purists at the time, there is no disputing that, but like it or not LD is obsolete, and its been long, long, surpassed by both DVD and Blu-Ray when it comes to well mastered, authentic picture presentation.

Blu-Ray and to a lesser extent DVD by far have more detail, more film grain and are much more thertically accurate when it comes to things like contrast, gamma, black levels and colour. Often LD with its huge limitations would be too warm, many times would be pumped up when it came to contrast and colour to compensate for the lack of resolution, and because colour temperature of consumer model CRT TVS at the time were set too cool by default, hence the pink/red push we would get in masters transferred to LD (and to DVD as well for that matter).

Like signofzeta said, you are not interested in what real 16mm/35mm/70mm film looks like, you are a fan of NTSC/PAL which is barely a drop in the ocean when it comes to what real actual film looks like.

Blu-Ray might be a digital format, but running some where near its best it has a lot of transfers that go close to perfecting the look and feel of analog film a hundred times closer than any other previous format. Ask any director and they will tell you the same thing.

Speaking of which LD, especially in the mid to late 90's and early 2000's was more "digital" than you care to admit.

Apparantly not according to yourself. Check your new thread on Alien LD vs DVD vs BD. Better mastering is also apparantly not the case with most BDs that aren't Criterion releases! Haha, BD is a joke.



Apparantly not for Alien (according to yourself) and apparantly not for all Disney BD releases that have had their grain scrubbed, and Predator, and and and, endless titles have been artificially "cleaned up" to make them look more modern so Target customers will go "oooh it pretty on LCD TV, bru ray amazing, $9.95? ooh that's a lot of money, oh well my friends will be jealous".

BD isn't for film fans. LD was.

Why do you think Tarantino still has a vast library of LD and VHS yet hasn't bothered to replace them with "superior" BD? Which one do you think he thinks is more "film like"? Do you think he understands film?



Sounds like a science smoke screen to me. LD is better. The real guys can feel it and you're just pissed off you got duped by BD marketing.



Did you ask Tarantino? Or Michael Bay?



Nope, the video is analogue.

Hi,

harlock, you just discovered the next part of the project.
Analog format with vga out, and or YPBPR... (no pal, no ntsc, universal one). Noise is and will be always in the analog devices. That's why they got this pleasantness. But we can easily remove it as they do on BD, for synthetic images lovers. For others ones, it's not to good to get the signal without noise. I've done test which brings the LD as clean as the BD, without life. Noise is to signal what fat is to living species. No to much, but we need it. But also don't lose in minds, that it's not necessary to have infinite quality. Vinyl has a dynamic range of 65-75Db, which is sufficient for us. Can someone tell to me why is it important to see the guys at the back of a stage whose don't even have anythings to do with the story, read the books titles that are disposed on a shelf.
Movie theater was an art.That' also why we can enjoy cartoon as much as a good film. We don't care about the cartoon resolution, but the color are important, story, design, etc... japan did know that, and the last release were cartoon...

Also, all laserdisc signals are analog modulated even the AC3, DTS, and PCM.
Even for you digital lovers, what you don't understand, is that any analog signal can do digital ones, but the reverse is impossible (keeping the full analog signal). We could store your bd on a LD if you want.


Is this a joke? They guys only understand money!



Did you ever asked to yourself, why the sound if the LD was terrible, even with digital contents?
- Analog Out. try the spdif part, and you'll see that the sound will became less exceptional.

Also, paint resolution is very low (That's also why you got paint on LD...), but there design can brings them to splendor.



I know that i'm blind, but for me it's the reverse

Yesterday, i saw "Le grand bleu" on LD of course, after discovering "cendrillon (2015)" in digital BD. I'm was surprised to see me thinking, wow that's beautiful, in some part of the LD. The cindarella motions don't even raised the beginning of this feeling.

Rgds,

I tend to disagree with the claim that LD is obsolete. There are still MANY films out there which never saw a DVD, let alone a Blu-Ray, release. For these titles, LD still represents the best possibility to watch them (and there's absolutely no guarantee that a better version will ever surface, because many films' original negatives or film prints aren't preserved well at all).

As long as this is the case, a format is by no means "obsolete" to me. There actually aren't many "obsolete" formats – maybe Video 2000 could be an obsolete format by now. Maybe Betamax too – though I have a (small) handful of films on beta tapes that I highly doubt I'll ever find in a better version on any other format.

I agree that LD (as well as all other "dead" formats) is obsolete for the mainstream or casual movie watcher (who, most likely, hasn't even heard of LD).

Or, to put it short, a "dead" format doesn't neccessarily equal an "obsolete" format.

I also have to disagree with a generalisation like "blu-ray isn't for film fans". This MAY apply to certain or even many blu-rays of mainstream films, BUT there's a lot of fine blu-ray editions for smaller and/or niché films already which were made with care, love and effort by film fans for film fans. I've seen blu-rays of older films that disappointed me, even some that are surpassed even by their LD counterparts, and I've also seen quite a few blus that left me stunned and in sheer amazement because of their look and quality.

There's always an exception to the rule. It certainly doesn't make much sense to demonise a format.

When the hell was a Laserdisc used as a reference for how a film should look? Many modern restorations uses a camera negative as a source along with the IP and at least one print for reference (depending on availability of course). Current DIs are capable of much more than old D1 masters or Laserdisc, meaning the compromises are nowhere near as drastic.

Regarding Disney I will admit that they f***ed up The Sword in the Stone real bad for sure. Wouldn't necessarily say the Laserdisc is a saner choice but for whatever reason it has a better master on iTunes.

Yeah, so? Research LD mastering when you get a chance. The video used in the majority of LDs ever produced went through at least one analog->digital->analog pass during mastering.

And, yes, this includes titles going back to the mid '80s. And, yes, this applies to masters stored as analog on videotape rather than D1 or D2.

But wait… there's more! Most of the LD players ever produced do at least one analog->digital->analog pass internally.

And, well, it looks like you're using a DVDO VP50 based on your sig, so there's another one!

It's so amazingly "analog", right?

Look, I own a near-complete set of MCA DiscoVision titles. In fact, I have so many dupes that I have an entire room in my basement FILLED with DiscoVision as well as a good helping of new LDs and I LOVE THEM, but I love them for what they are: relics of a bygone era; history.

I actively work on 35mm '70s and '80s film restorations, so I think I'm qualified to say the following two things:
1. The best LDs look absolutely nothing like the 35mm interpositive or release prints they were struck from.
2. Most LDs were graded during mastering to look decent on the insanely-varied red-pushing contrasty CRT sets of the day and often look considerably different from low-fade (e.g., LPP stock) release prints of the same film. LDs featuring "untouched" colors is largely a myth. Hell, just compare the JSC Star Wars release with the later DefCol release to see how much it varies for just one trilogy.

I love them because they're STILL overall the superior format for old movies.

I don't feel like I'm handling history when I load them up, just the best of the best.

You're just another tech guy who thinks with his head, not his heart.

Case in point, watch Star Wars: Definintive - "Wow, cool this is awesome!"

Watch it on BD - "What? I don't remember that, what's going on? Wow it looks so,...bland..blah.."

I preferred the colour timing on the LD of Aliens to the washed out DVD, but these cases are few and far in between, and the BD of Alien and Aliens objectively destroys the LD in every way, just like the vast majority of well mastered Blu-Rays vs LDs or DVDs. You are just being a sheep about the Criterion releases, there are many studios that although arent as consistent as Criterion, feature plenty of well mastered tittles. Fact.



Alien and Aliens on BD destroy the LDs extremely easily in every possible way, the 2008 release of Predator is 50 times better than any LD or DVD release of the film, and you are neglecting to mention the many tittles of older restored films on BD that are beautifully mastered, and are critically full of praise by credible reviewers, film historians, directors and cinematographers which are continually amazed by the Blu-Ray format.


Tarantino is a fan of Blu-Ray, so is Steven Spielberg, so is William Friedkin, so is John Landis, so is James Cameron, so is Ridley Scott, so is Paul Verhoeven and I could go on. Give me the source that indicates how Tarantino thinks VHS/LD is better than Blu-Ray, otherwise you are making up BS as usual to prop up your sinking argument.



Specs matter, and if you have the right people behind the transfer that know what they are doing than that makes all the difference in the world. Fact.



It has many digital chains, both the LD releases from mid/late 90's and early 2000's as well as the players themselves. The only way to get a complete analog image from LD would be to use a late 70's or early 80's LD player with a period CRT TV, otherwise the analog signal have internal digital passes.


Case in point, watch Star Wars 1997 special editions on LD - "What? I don't remember that, what's going on? Wow it looks so,...bland..blah.."

Hi,

Of course there is digital point. But it's not sampling.
Even in the VHS, they're were digital point.
Also we don't care that the LD is technically outdated.



No LD master look like the 35mm interpositive or release prints they were struck from as vinyl master is as far as the master it's struck from.
So what ?



Yes, 32 Bit audio is better than 16 Bit, in the real world 65db are sufficient, so it's 12 Bit in digital. Yes specs matters....only for people who aren't knowing what they're doing.

Rgds,

Laserdisc is not going to make a come back. What is the point? DVD/Blu-Ray is better and cheaper to produce.

That said I do have a LD machine and a few discs but it is mostly for nostalgia reasons. Given the choice between the latest Star Wars film on laserdisc at £100/$100 or the DVD/Blu-Ray at £15/$15 which would you buy?

Would rather see Pioneer releasing a LD/DVD/Blu-Ray combo player than any new titles. Not likely to happen though.