i understand and agree, but i bought the DYRL box when it first came out for 100.
i also have the flashback and the english dub of the film, while bad it is super rare.
and i did have at one time the first issue on LD of DYRL, but sold that one years ago.

it would be cool to have the BD but i also don't have the system to play the game, but i do
have the super famicom game that is pretty killer.

I have Wings of Honneamise on Japanese (AC-3) LD, US LD, & Blu-Ray (in addition to the DVD which came with the Blu-Ray). It's very disappointing that the BD edition doesn't carry over the truly amazing video extras from the Memorial Box.

Heh, yeah, I have three different JP versions of Royal Space Force; original Memorial Box, TV Size ver, CLV AC-3 version. Kind of ridiculous, but honestly all three versions have their pluses and minuses.

Just wanted to chime in and say that anime was the reason I started collecting laserdiscs in the first place. I spotted them on rakuten, at a much, much much lower price than DVDs and thought that "hey, maybe those things would be cheaper to buy!". Turn out, with shipping, they weren't but it was too late, I was hooked Getting the LDs in the mail the first time, looking at the well illustrated jacket, finding a double sided insert sheet with interviews and production sketches, as well as holding the giant disc in my hand for the first time was quite amazing.

My first LD anime was You're Under Arrest, a show which had a large part in me getting interested in "old school" anime instead of just new shows. The fact that it was a pretty well mastered release also helped first impressions on the format as a whole. The thing with YUA that I haven't seen with any other anime LD I've gotten my hands on since is the fact that each episode came with two illustrated jackets. One housed the disc and the other housed the insert sheets etc.
I really think it's the perfect anime time capsule. Style, wow-factor, extra content (possibly not seen elsewhere) all rolled into one, impressive package.

yeph, anime was one of the major reasons i stuck with LD.
when my father bought our first player in 89 and i found out that anime LDs were cheaper than Japanese VHS
i knew i had to get some.

i think that's a major reason i didn't stick with CED, there was no anime released on the format.
that and the quality was not so hot.

Wait, STICK with CED?!?! I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually owned a CED player when CEDs were around. Were there any advantages to CED over VHS, or did your family have a preference for the "under-appreciated" formats?

Lots of people bought CED. The players were cheap (half the price of a VCR), the movies were cheap (half the price of a VHS, or less), & it was marketed by Sears as well as RCA. For a while it seemed like the next big thing. Unfortunately, the sell-through video market failed to develop, & the format didn't have the features needed to succeed in the instructional (academic & industrial) market, which is what kept the US consumer market afloat, or the performance needed to hold onto a dedicated core group such as the videophiles who adopted LD. Seriously, can you imagine Criterion CEDs?

no, i just bought one used since a local place had a bunch of discs for a buck each.
always wanted to get one. i did and didn't like it.

Anime was why I bought into LD as well, in 91 or 92. Import VHS was usually about %30-50 more expensive than the same thing on LD due to the rental tax being built into VHS releases. It's crazy to pay $100 for an LD, but it's even crazier to pay $150 for the same movie on a crappy VHS!

I owned several CED players when RCA was in full production - I got my first CED player in 1982, a few months after I got the LD-1100 LD player. It's superiority over VHS was, more solid color due to better time base stability and sharper overall image than VHS due to flatter bandwidth and, again, more stable time base. Once RCA introduced the SJT line of players (the auto loading models) they had licked 99% of the skipping problem, making CED much more attractive - RCA's interactive SJT-400 was wonderful and had better features than any consumer LD player then available - and at the time, CED's title selection was about double that of LD's and finding an actual copy of a title on CED was easier than LaserDisc. RCA did their own mastering in-house from internegatives, not prints like most LaserDisc's at the time, so discs like Star Wars on CED looked better than LaserDisc despite CED's 250 lines of resolution to LaserDisc's 330.

Here, to see what it was actually like then, read this:
https://rapidshare.com/files/1392942798/Video%20Magazine%20LV-CED%20Slug%20It%20Out.pdf

Just wondering, are there any specials or bonus material featured on LD releases that haven't found their way onto DVD/BD yet?

As an example, I wouldn't surprised if the production sketches and the like featured on the end of disc 2 of the GitS Premium Box also was included in either a related artbook/mook or in some kind of gallery on a DVD/BD release.
However, other stuff, like the small interview with the Headgear-people at the end of the first Patlabor movie, or the musical performances at the end of the first discs of Bubblegum Crisis and Idol Defense Force Hummingbird - have they been released elsewhere?

Some of this stuff can hardly be called important, and sometimes not even interesting, but it's still fun to have, you know?

My understanding is that the principal bonus feature on the Wings of Honneamise memorial boxes has never appeared elsewhere. This is roughly an hour of video shots of production art, including modelwork, accompanied by the complete Ryuichi Sakamoto soundtrack. I consider this probably one of the greatest video extras ever.

The original two Sol Bianca LDs contain 5.25" floppy discs which I have no way of reading. I'm not sure anyone knows exactly what's on them.

The thing that makes those things so great is that they are full screen. I cannot understand why for the life of me why, when still frame galleries are incorporated into LDs and DVDs, that they feel the need to severally border the images with superfluous crap. I mean, you have so little resolution as it is, and then they go ahead and throw away %30-50 of it by putting some useless border around it.

The Royal Space Force stuff is great because it basically just plays the entire OST while panning and zooming konte. The art is very clear and well represented.

That sounds incredibly bad a**. Well, the Sol Bianca 2.5'' floppy-thing sounds interesting as well but...
Oh and hey, signofzeta, I see you're here as well...which doesn't surprise me the least

The Hurricane Live 2032/2033 videos from BGC were released on DVD in the Japanese DVD box but were not included with the BD box because they would have looked awful anyway. They were edited on video so they will never look great. BGC looks friggin' amazing on BD though!

There's a video at the end of the first BGC LD volume that's not one of the Hurricane Live videos. I will say, it should be possible to re-create the non-live-action HL videos from the original film, although the editing would be a pain. I think it's Asu e Touchdown that is made up of material showing the back-story of the Knight Sabers that never showed up in any of the episodes.

Ahhh, OK. I have not watched the LDs for so long I forgot that it was not part of Hurricane Live. I have not watched my Jp DVD box since 2002 when I bought it so I am unsure if it was included. I may have to check that out. I do remember that I never opened the last disc with the "Bye^2 Knight Sabers: Holiday in Bali" special on it so I do not remember if there were any other extras. The weird thing about the Jp DVD box is that despite the BD remaster, the DVD box has jumped in value to 10,000-15,000 more than it was retail. Maybe because the BD box has the 8 episodes and nothing else, I don't know.

I just watched Iketeru Futari (1999) [PILA-1496] and it looked pretty good (there was a very low level of noise throughout, but it wasn't noticeable at seating distance. Although they had two clean (in more than one sense, apparently) OPs at the end that were both top-notch in PQ terms: completely noiseless, sharp and deeply saturated), but I don't have a DVD to compare it too. Does anybody have screen shots of a DVD version?

Being a 1999 release from Pioneer, I would take a guess and say that the LD could very well look better because DVDs at that point were using composite LD masters anyway. Even the shows Pioneer/Geneon have re-released a thousand times in Japan are still using composite masters. Tenchi Muyo! TV, Shin Tenchi Muyo and El Hazard TV being some examples. I have the original R2J Tenchi OVA DVD box but not Tenchi TV so I am not sure what it looked like picture wise, but the US DVDs were awful. I bought the new, cheapy release of Tenchi TV from Japan and although it was still composite, it looked really good. I have not looked at my US LDs for a very very long time though. The "composite" nature of the Tenchi TV DVDs would be about the same as El Hazard TV released by TRSI and the R2J's of Appleseed and Crusher Dominion.

Besides, Pioneer and King Records were releasing amazing quality LDs by 1998/1999 whereas Bandai Visual became cheap and lazy. Half hour CLV releases or 2 episode TV series in CLV format for instance. Having just watched the first volume of MAZE TV, I would add Victor to that list of quality releases too. MAZE (released throughout 1997/98) looked amazingly good. Fantastic grain and colour saturation, especially compared to the crappy, washed out OVA LDs.

Edit: Looks like a DVD was released on 24-03-2000 (a year after the LD) so it could be a newer master but knowing Pioneer, it would still be composite and probably on a single layer disc. Interesting thing to me at least is, the DVD listed on Amazon Jp is called "TV broadcast version" and listed with a running time of 90 minutes and the LD is listed as 112 minutes and listed on Suruga-ya as 18 plus. So I am guessing it was one of the many late 90's/early 2000 anime to have a "TV" and "video" version? Was there excessive fanservice or anything in the LD version?

Edit 2: Ha, just saw the beginning of Ep 2 online and a show that starts with the main male character having a wank over the female "friend" character says it all

Didn't TRSI have a video up that compared the original El Hazard DVDs with their new DVDs? Was it not all that great after all?

I guess that would make the LD the definitive version of Iketeru Futari anyways.