Just found some laserdiscs on ebay and sellers claim that the discs are badly scratched up but play perfectly fine in their laserdisc player. I probably own close to 200 laserdiscs and I don't notice any deep scratches or excessive scratching on the discs. The way the discs are designed I thought it's pretty hard to have scratches on them unless someone is intentionally scratching them up with a knife or something. Maybe I have to put my laserdiscs under light on a certain angle but I never really notice a ton of scratches.

I found an old SONY LD player that would release the clamping BEFORE the disc had stopped turning.

The disc would basically be rotating at high speed on the tray... you can imagine how quickly that gets bad scratches on a disc!

Julien

Ex rentals, library or lending to jerk friends.

Some people in Japan say things like that, too, but they may be exaggerating a bit.

Let's have a contest then: post picture of your worst case of scratched LDs!

Then try to play and report if it has any effect at all.

Julien

I have often wondered the same query.

Picture peeps standing on LD's in driveways on loose gravel !
Throwing them like Frisbees at a Frisbee golf range !
Or just plan old abusing them by letting young children throw them around the house lmao !

Funny, some of my worst beat up domestic Godzilla LD's i bought used still play and sound nominally !
Beyond all hope, could not believe that fact !

Treat 'em nice mates !
Long Live LaserDisc !

Cheers to the membership !

As far as I know I don’t have a single side with any kind of significant scratch. I’ve never scratched one and I never bought a used one that had scratches.

LD wasn’t a slob’s format…originally. Who’s going to scratch a movie they just paid $150 for? It’s either in the jacket, in the player, or making the trip between the two. Just don’t f it up during the 15 seconds you’re holding it and you’ll be fine.

For extreme scratches... we already knew about this experiment:



The sound quality was OK, the disc was still playable but audio was destroyed.

Here comes another attempt and this time the sound appears vastly better.



Sadly they couldn't test the LD after etching.

Based on these videos, I'd say the problems with LDs are in this order or importance:

Laser Rot (can't be fixed), then warping (can be fixed), then scratches (a distant issue).

Julien

So I don't know what is on this laserdisc but it looked like a dirty look on it as if someone put their fingerprints all over my copy of Forbidden World laserdisc. With that said none of my laserdisc players have had any issues playing this laserdisc. I've captured that movie with an lx-h670, lx-900, and now CLD-3080. I didn't capture with my CLD-53 but I'd imagine it will read it fine if the other players can. So the laser is pretty strong to read through smudges and other things on laserdisc.

Wait till you get those smudges that won't play through.

Will it play but with rot? Some laserdiscs have cloudy spots from rot correct?

I have a copy of the US laserdisc of The Bounty with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson. One of my favourite films of
all times ( magnificent performance by Anthony Hopkins, excellent score by Vangelis ).

It has the sticker of a rental shop in Austin, Texas. Both discs are very badly scratched. The third CAV is so badly
scratched that there is a certain scene where the player simply hangs like a scratched record. All I can do
is fast forward a bit and then it continues. The picture on all three sides is not clean at all, loads of chroma
noise and in the first two or three minutes I can see crosstalk ( for example I can faintly see the Orion logo from the very
beginning for a couple of seconds one or two minutes later ). I would like to have a different copy in order to
be able to compare.