Laserdiscs

Originally posted by Robtard
Unless you're some sort of collector and you want an LD player/LD films as part of your film-format collection, I'd not invest in an LD player; as it's obsolete tech.

I'd not even invest too heavily into BluRay. Everything is going digital; why have bulky physical discs when you can fit thousands of film on a computer hard-drive and stream the films to your television using a film media server.

What I do now; have just a bit over 1,800 films.

Originally posted by P-Geyser
Agreed about the LD player(Still lingers in the back of my mind) but as far as investing in BluRay, I already did so when I purchased my PS4 and Xbox One. Basically I like owning classic movies such as The Godfather, Bladerunner etc. Another friend of my basically goes the same route that you do which I have to admit, is a pretty good setup.

I barely remember Laserdisc. I seem to recall I might have seen one in like 4th grade or something. Yeah, pretty sure my teacher played something on one, I remember that big ol' disc.

While I agree with Rob to some extent (having digital films is basically the wave of the future) I also agree with Geyser. I like having hard copies of films too. You get highest quality that way, too. Some movies you just want the highest quality video and sound. I have a ton of digital films, but many of them are noticeably lower quality, unless of course you have so much storage capacity that you can have huge, huge files. But that gets ridiculous.

I find that a 1080p digital film at around 3.5-5gigs is good quality in both video and sound. Anything higher improves it more. Over 10gigs is kind of a waste unless you're on an 8K TV or similar.

On some older flicks, you can get away with 2-3gigs as those were never HiDef to begin with. eg I think my copy of Hawk the Slayer (1980) is 1.8gigs; it's fine, as the film was grainy and low quality goodness upon release.

The ones that are 30+gigs are ridiculously large, it's basically the full BluRay ripped to digital with no file shrinking.

Originally posted by Patient_Leech
I barely remember Laserdisc. I seem to recall I might have seen one in like 4th grade or something. Yeah, pretty sure my teacher played something on one, I remember that big ol' disc.

While I agree with Rob to some extent (having digital films is basically the wave of the future) I also agree with Geyser. I like having hard copies of films too. You get highest quality that way, too. Some movies you just want the highest quality video and sound. I have a ton of digital films, but many of them are noticeably lower quality, unless of course you have so much storage capacity that you can have huge, huge files. But that gets ridiculous.

I still own a working Laserdisc player. The visual quality compared to what VHS was in the day was breathtaking, not to mention the superior sound. It was an early preview of DVD & Blu-rays. But when I bought my first HDTV in 2006 and plugged in the LD player, the visual quality was disappointing; almost looked like second generation VHS. Incompatible technology - there was no HDMI connection to make. So I started replacing most everything I had bought on Laserdisc with DVD and Blu-ray versions, and by the time I bought a PS3 player, I just put in in storage along with my discs.

Laserdiscs were expensive; I only owned a dozen or so, and rented the others. Buying some for $30-40 dollars Canadian seemed a good deal, as they often retailed between $60-100 dollars. The most expensive set I owned was the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition, bought at Christmas in 1997 for $180. It felt like the Holy Grail of my movie collection for a long time. When DVDs came out and were retailing for $20 each, I felt so spoiled and lucky to buy them in big numbers!

Originally posted by roughrider
I still own a working Laserdisc player. The visual quality compared to what VHS was in the day was breathtaking, not to mention the superior sound. It was an early preview of DVD & Blu-rays. But when I bought my first HDTV in 2006 and plugged in the LD player, the visual quality was disappointing; almost looked like second generation VHS. Incompatible technology - there was no HDMI connection to make. So I started replacing most everything I had bought on Laserdisc with DVD and Blu-ray versions, and by the time I bought a PS3 player, I just put in in storage along with my discs.

Laserdiscs were expensive; I only owned a dozen or so, and rented the others. Buying some for $30-40 dollars Canadian seemed a good deal, as they often retailed between $60-100 dollars. The most expensive set I owned was the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition, bought at Christmas in 1997 for $180. It felt like the Holy Grail of my movie collection for a long time. When DVDs came out and were retailing for $20 each, I felt so spoiled and lucky to buy them in big numbers!

Early hdtv's had bad upscaling.

Modern vhs honestly looked decent on a 720p hdtv with good upscaling, the same as a PS2 with components.

Originally posted by P-Geyser
Was it a pain in the ass to have to flip the disc over to continue to watch whatever movie?

They found a good part of the movie to break at so it wasn't that bad; it was just what you dealt with. No different than having an intermission, which longer movies used to have when I was younger before audiences got more patient.

The Star Wars Special Edition laserdiscs had frame-by-frame advance and freezing on the third act disc sides, but that meant double the amount of encoding on that side of the disc. That meant that side of the disc could have no more than a 1/2 hour of content, when the standard was an hour on each disc side.

Originally posted by roughrider
I still own a working Laserdisc player. The visual quality compared to what VHS was in the day was breathtaking, not to mention the superior sound. It was an early preview of DVD & Blu-rays. But when I bought my first HDTV in 2006 and plugged in the LD player, the visual quality was disappointing; almost looked like second generation VHS. Incompatible technology - there was no HDMI connection to make. So I started replacing most everything I had bought on Laserdisc with DVD and Blu-ray versions, and by the time I bought a PS3 player, I just put in in storage along with my discs.

Laserdiscs were expensive; I only owned a dozen or so, and rented the others. Buying some for $30-40 dollars Canadian seemed a good deal, as they often retailed between $60-100 dollars. The most expensive set I owned was the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition, bought at Christmas in 1997 for $180. It felt like the Holy Grail of my movie collection for a long time. When DVDs came out and were retailing for $20 each, I felt so spoiled and lucky to buy them in big numbers!