kevkev

got a pretty decent deal for a pioneer 1750 and about 100 discs. 50 naff ones 50 widescreen. sure the picture and sound isnt that great but its worth it when they are so cheap. and i love the way that most of the time they use poster art for the covers. question: why did they release the jurassic park box set? is it better quality having the film spread over 5 sides?? i was also very impressed with the 2 disc blade runner dir cut. the image is very nice indeed. also picked up flight of dragons (pal, has some disc rot grrr,) is it still worth anything? and the japanese fullscreen lasers of licence to kill and the living daylights. would they sell?

ScissorPuppy

What does the art on the james bond covers looks like?

Gizmo

Id love to pick one up but people tend to gouge prices on them on Craigslist.

speedyray

Have fun, I did something similar about 4 years ago. Still working through some movies. Ebay is the best way to find if something is worth anything.

milo bloom

The Jurassic Park box is on 5 sides so it can use the CAV format which offers an improvement in picture quality and freeze frame ability. Hope you got a dual sided player, I've only got a single sided player and those flips are a chore!

DVD Polizei

I bought my Virgin Mary toasted cheese sandwich for a measly $14,987.45.

dhmac

Did it taste heavenly?

Josh Z

Laserdiscs can be mastered in two formats: CLV which gets an hour per side, or CAV which gets 30 minutes per side. CAV has slightly better picture quality (the difference is marginal).

Not all laserdisc players have the ability to freeze-frame or slo-mo on CLV discs. On many players, if you pause the movie, the screen just goes blank until you restart it. You need a model with digital field memory to get those functions, and even so the quality of the freezed image is only a half-resolution video field.

CAV discs have freeze-frame and slo-mo on any player, and the quality is in full-resolution frames. For that reason, movies with a lot of eye candy like Jurassic Park were sometimes pressed in CAV format so that you could get a closer look at the special effects.

Movies that ran just over 2 hours were often pressed with 2 CLV sides and 1 CAV side. On Star Trek: Generations, Sides 1 and 3 were CLV but Side 2 was in CAV so that you could play around with the Enterprise crash scene.

Obviously, laserdisc was a lower resolution format than DVD, but it's slo-mo functions were much better than the digital format, especially if you get a model with a jog/shuttle dial on the remote. You can look at scenes in true frame-by-frame analysis, or manipulate them to whatever speed you like. As opposed to DVD, where it's hit-or-miss what frame you pause on, and slo-mo is incredibly jerky.

kevkev

i'm probably gonna just use it for building up on old films. its not ac3 so i dont really want all those films from 94 onwards. but if it was just a 2 channel film i'll buy it. i'm not a big fan of 5.1 remixes.

Chill Pill

Are there a lot of laserdisc only titles?

Josh Z

Many classic, idependent, and concert films (or music video compilations) that were released on laserdisc never made the transition to DVD due to rights issues.

Chill Pill

Wow. Thanks. Might be a good purchase if I can find a player for cheap.

Josh Z

Keep in mind that laserdisc picture quality is highly dependent on the quality of the player used, much more so than DVD.

sparks

And don't watch them on a HDTV...but, they look great on an analog one though!

Also, with the newer players, you can freeze frame with CLV...but not in the same spot all the time, i.e. "The Rescuers" famous naked from the waist up lady in the window. It's 2 frames, but sometimes you only see one.