The US BD uses the same master as the German BD. The US BD has the original mono soundtrack on lossless audio. The German release has new 5.1 mixes on lossy audio. It isn't from VHS but looks like it anyway.

I still believe some of you guys haven't watched a half decent blu-ray disc on a 50"+ display (somewhat properly calibrated, I will take eyeballing). It is then really game over, lights out! LD and DVD has no competition.

There are releases like moontrap and a few others where LD might have the upper hand due to better mastering but they are few and between. Most 90s era LDs were also butchered by dnr and ee.

I have also invested a good penny or two on the LD gear and discs but I have to be realistic. Saying LD is the top dog is misleading everyone here. It is a fun format, only way to get some releases although the list is getting narrower. It ends there. No other superiority. Period.

It is much easier to master a BD and UHD BD. They cover much wider colorspace and closer to film. UHD BD matches digital film and pretty darn close to 35mm in color space. So there is almost no color timing process involved. All the colors on the 35mm film also exist in the rec.2020 container UHD BD uses. NTSC covers only a mere %40-50 of the colors from a 35mm. When they do the transfers, they need to compensate for the colors that don't exist for ntsc but available on the 35mm. These are not my words but the words from the godfather of analog video himself, yves faroudja.

The current master for Moontrap is clearly superior to a VHS but is still extremely soft. DNR is very heavy and makes textures pretty much non-existent. The US Blu-Ray has fake grain added while the German BD is the initial, scrubbed mess.

I been noticing this fake bluray grain on Earthquake. Talk about a snake oil bluray format.

I recently bought some box sets I always wanted.
I'm still looking for some criterions, but my laserdisc collection is close to being complete after buying those:

What......???????? That's just stupid to do.

Yep, as funny as it seems that's what they did.
http://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0& ... 60&i=7&l=0
The grain structure is completely out of place and way too noisy to be authentic (especially in blacks). Plus it gives no extra detail to the image. You can add grain as a visual effect to get a more old school look but this is certainly not the right film to do so.

And there you have my point.

Good people who knew what they were doing worked on laserdisc releases.

Idiots who ARE probably just out of school mastered attrocities like Predator on BD.

It won't be too much longer before we're hearing about how much better LD is than UHD-BD.

If you want to have a discussion about poor or declined mastering standards please do so but put that in its proper context - criticise the mastering, not whatever format it happens to end up on. Any capitulation to 'mass-market cynical corporate milking' would have begun with DVD in any case, and just continued with newer formats.

It's the opposite actually. The reason it's so difficult to do a proper master for Laserdisc is because of its limitations and how bad it actually is as a medium compared to a 35mm IP or a DI. Those engineers were fully aware of how much they butchered all those films.

If any format was optimized for home viewing because of all the limitations and how difficult the said format was to master for it was Laserdisc, that in turn goes some way to explaining why LD took so long to master for. The end transfer would look very little like the film that was originally shot in a lot of technical areas.

A well mastered BD or UHD BD is far, far, far closer to the desired accurate result because of the specs.

with that said BD has many bad transfers too, but don't kid yourself, so does LD.

I just received a copy of Zulu, the Criterion collection in the mail today.

FYI: If you watch Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (I think) you will see a brief reference to Zulu in the film. It seems a British commander at an African outpost had lost his leg sometime overnight and had discovered the loss during the storming of the outpost by the Zulu's in the morning. Pretty preposterous as all Monty Python films are.

Alien: Special Widescreen Collector's Edition (1979)
Fox Video
NTSC

Atlantis (1991)
Pioneer LDC
NTSC

Goldfinger: Deluxe Collector's Edition (1964)
MGM/UA Home Video
NTSC

Heat (1995)
Warner Home Video
NTSC

Jurassic Park (1993)
MCA/Universal Home Video
NTSC

Last Man Standing (1996)
Pioneer LDCE
PAL

Interesting. I was at the store about 9 months before your post and I got a bunch of anime from boxes of unpriced titles (Y100 a piece) that were just dumped onto a large floor area, probably 1000s of discs in a ten square meter area. Then the graded/sorted stuff at the back of the store. on shelves and in filing bins.

Johnny Mnemonic (1995) (Uncut)
Bandai / Emotion
NTSC

Freshly arrived from japan and...
FACTORY SEALED!

Nice cover, kingpin !

I have just come back from Jakarta. I bought a couple of nice LDs.

I got the HK LD of Prison of Fire, a really good Hong Kong movie, as well as a very nice Hong Kong music LD called "Faye Wong in Concert". She is quite good.

I also got five very rare Indonesian movies on LD I had never seen before anywhere else and a couple of Indonesian LDs with Indonesian music. I really hope I will find
the time to add them all to the database but I still need to find a way to make decent cover scans.

Recent arrivals

Nice! Check City on Fire next, it was the basis for Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino just hoped no one would ever see it I think, I remember watching it in the late 90s and being pretty dissapointed that RD wasn't original.

You can catch Faye Wong in the Hong Kong masterpiece Chun King Express. Love her music too.

City on Fire is a AAA++ movie for sure. That Alto in the lobby/penthouse scene is one of the most amazing in history. The poor little car...

That's the same movie right? Every HK movie having six different names confuses me sometimes.

Lucky you! I'd love to find some old Indonesian horror/fantasy films on LD. Apparently there were quite many releases on both laserdisc and betamax.