this is a vinyl record and this is a DVD
but what if W laser discs or disco
Vision as they were once called used to be a very sought-after video format and
by some they still are from 1979 up
until the Advent of the DVD in the late '90s laser dis was the best option for
experiencing high-end video in the comfort of your own home or high school
science classroom and it was the dream
format of movie Fanatics everywhere and
this copile love was welld deserved it had many of the qualities that would
eventually become the key selling features of DVD and subsequently Blu-ray
with twice the resolution of VHS the ability to pause on a still frame
support for surround sound instant chapter skipping director's commentary
and it could even do 1080i resolution in
special cases near the end of its life and it was wasn't just the users
filmmakers loved the way that laser dis made their films look and sound it was
the first format to be capable of Home THX audio and it was the first format to
receive the Criterion Collection the ultimate versions of films like Blade
Runner and Raging Bull in fact in some famous cases it was the best format to
ever receive that definitive cut of the film Star Wars speaking of Star Wars
Lucas film even stored raw foot footage on these discs and used it for editing
with a system that they called edit Droid so return to the Jedi was on laser
dis before it was even in the theater but just how well does it hold up today
was it replaced by DVD because of some kind of technological Improvement or was
it just out of cost in convenience to find out we spent over 1,000 us to buy
one of the coveted few players that are still available and copies of Terminator
2 in a variety of formats to compare them and find out once and for all is
biggest disc best disc and what else
could laser dis do can it play the segue
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hello believe it or not the concept of Electron Beam data storage was invented
way back in the late 50s or early 60s by
David Paul Greg it then entered a dormant State due to some patent
Shenanigans until ultimately MCA and Phillips worked together to bring the
technology to Market reusing the form factor of vinyl records which MCA was
producing by the millions thusly laser
dis was born it soft launched in 1978
with the release of Jaws in the Atlanta Georgia test market and then formally
launched in 1979 to label laser disc
with words like success or failure would
be an oversimplification in either case
it did fail to gain widespread adoption but it succeeded at pushing home Cinema
forward and it succeeded at standing the test of time maintaining its admittedly
Niche relevance for over 20 years that's
right the last movies on this format were released in 2001 and Pioneer
continued to manufacture players for it until
2009 believe it or not I have never
watched a film on laser dis my only experience with it was one of my high
school teachers pulled out a player and played something for a little bit to
kill some time that's it I've never seen
a laser dis movie before but I have used quite a few for karaoke oh more on that
later ooh I like this setup we've got a CRT for authenticity and then we've also
got a retrotink 5x so that we can watch it on the bigger screen I love how much
every time we pull out a CRT we're like oh I miss CRT it just looks better on
there CRTs are so great as soon as you
become that age where you no longer hear the wine can I just say at this point
before we've even done the side by side this knocks the ever loving snot out of
VHS for image quality that looks great if TVs never got as big as as they are
today I don't see how realistically we would need higher resolution than this
like it's retina it's really sharp let's show off another cool laser dis feature
by skipping to the next chapter what it's pretty quick yeah it's
not bad it's not instantaneous you can hear the the laser moving yeah but it's
fast enough where comparing it to fast forwarding it it's night and day I'm
going to be the one to say it his pecs look great to be clear by modern
standards this is not high resolution we're talking 425 to 440 TV lines
depending on the region but it was uncompressed and by comparison VHS was
only 240 TV lines so this was closer to
DVD grade image quality but more than 15
years earlier it's possibly even better picture quality than DVD because color
banding doesn't happen on laser dis we have a VHS player and a copy of the same
film on VHS we're going to look at that later but first let's experience just a
little bit more glorious disc based movie goodness ah will that move ever
not be cool I don't I don't think it ever can be I'm going to sit on the
floor because that's what we used to do back when CRT TVs were small as we' just
sit closer to the TV I never did that because it was bad for your eyes that's
what our mothers and fathers told us they meant well but baby boomers don't
know everything it turns out unfortunately we don't have a great sound setup today just the speakers
built into our TV but audio was was another major advantage of the platform
laser disk supported multiple audio tracks and it was the first format to
support digitally encoded surround sound at home they even went so far as to
create an ad with Ray Charles the really wild part is that what we're
experiencing right now is far from laser
dis final form as a standard that persisted for over 20 years it actually
changed a lot over its lifespan in 1986
the BBC released their domesday project which was sort of a census of the UK and
the data was only viewable on a BBC Master aiv System which included a
Philips LV ROM drive that couldn't play movies but it could read dataon laser
discs few other uses of LV ROM are publicly known in 1987 Pioneer released
the first player that could also play CD video not to be confused with video CD
which was an all digital format that came in 1993 CD video could hold 5
minutes of video and 20 minutes of extra
audio then in 1990 adding further
confusion video single disc came along which was a laser disc the size of a CD
these often contained single songs or short musical performances because they
had room for only 5 minutes of video with the accompanying audio and no extra
audio it was released only in Japan with the exception of one promotional disc in
the US that was included with the earliest release of Terminator 2 then by
the early 1990s every player on the market could also play audio CDs a
format that went from zero to complete dominance within the lifespan of laser
disk though once again laser disk was low-key way ahead of the curve and
state-of-the-art players could play Dolby Digital surround sound starting
with the 1992 release of Batman Returns
several arcade systems like the Tito d3b released in 1991 using laser dis for
highquality interactive video titles and in 199 before remember this is still 3
years before DVD would bring 480p
resolution to the mainstream laser dis became capable of HD playback with the
release of high Vision in Japan now it was only 1,35 lines instead of 1080 and
it was interlaced so 1035 I but who
cares it was HD in
1994 that is 6 years before the first US
HD broadcast which was the Super Bowl in January of
2000 why don't we have one of those they're R expensive I get it R expensive
cuz there's not many of them in a way that's kind of a great summary of laser
discs problems or at least part of them
while the barrier to entry for a low-end laser dis machine was certainly higher
than a low-end VCR it wasn't that out of
line with mid-range VHS players and the discs themselves were actually cheaper
in some cases yeah by the early 1990s they typically went for $25 to $30 MSRP
which is significantly less than the $85 to $100 that rental tapes would when
they hit the market around that same time but this was not necessarily the
case for production with European laser
dis Association president R Salter noting in
1992 that duplicating tape is very very
cheap whereas the pressing process of disc is 10 to $12 a totally different
ballpark if his price is accurate that's a huge disadvantage compared to tape cuz
what was a blank VHS or beta worth at that time it was $5 for 4 and 1 half or
6 hours of recording time and that was retail what we could buy at the store
with that said pricing is almost a sidebar discussion here the real culprit
for laser disk status as a niche format probably lies in one key benefit that
VHS enjoyed over laser dis and even DVD
for most of its life the ability to record TV before the VCR TV had to be
watched while it was airing the Ed Sullivan Show for example ran for more
than a thousand episodes frequently to an audience of tens of millions but many
of those episodes including the first one are considered lost media today
because the station either lost or didn't save the original recordings and
nobody had the ability to record at home
by comparison commodity VH s players had
built-in clocks not so you could see what time it was during movie night but
so you could schedule the recording of your favorite shows so you could watch
them back later usually skipping the commercials oh yeah and because the
recorders were ubiquitous everyone knew somebody who was into bootlegging VHS so
it was often super cheap to pick up movies and pay-per-view programs on tape
the other culprit for laser dis lack of adoption might have to do with its
Target demographic toward the end of its lifespan as VHS prices fell laser disc
costs stayed High because it was treated by the studios as a niche format for
filmmakers and enthusiasts and they differentiated it not just by the
quality but through the production of special editions made with higher
quality Masters extra deleted scenes or
inserts or commentary tracks the 1989
movie War of the Roses For example cost $69.98 at release for the special
edition though it did include Denny commentary which I think we can all
agree makes just about anything better still kills me that this is what won the
format wore especially when you factor in why all right let's do the side by
side oh wow this is terrible there is a
lot of artifacts going across the screen it's a funny thing because I look at
this and I go ew that is disgustingly
analog but laser dis is also analog
which we'll talk about a little bit later it's just way better better analog
In fairness to VHS this is obviously a very old tape and it's also a very old
player oh wow yeah the flame the F the
fire is not even yellow contrary to what the marketing would have you believe
fast forward is not that fast this is
what maybe 3x speed might even be 2x
this is slow enough where if I put a YouTube video on this speed I could
still understand what was happening oh this is the part you wanted to see right
I wanted to see this yeah oh sorry oh man it was a skill to be able to press
the play button right at the moment where the momentum would stop right in
time to hit the spot that you wanted to play from can you imagine being a film
buff and going over to somebody else's house and not knowing how to use a VCR
because all you've done is laser
disc still cool wow I didn't think my impression of
VHS could get worse and then I saw this
and the laser disc advantages keep coming one of the reasons that we can't
really get into image quality analysis is that as long as you have a supported
player in dis laser disc does frame by frame playback but VHS does not it's
also far less susceptible to degradation due to heat and humidity so it wouldn't
really be fair given that these are probably still in perfect shape though
it should be noted that they could warp in heat like any plastic disc based
storage medium and they were very SU suceptible to Accidental damage from
children please don't do that discs cleaned with isopropyl
alcohol would often turn cloudy and even if you didn't mistreat your discs if you
got unlucky there is the potential for disc rot to occur over time though this
seems to be limited to discs that were pressed in certain factories notably
Sony dadc the laser dis database has a
running list of affected releases including notably Batman returns from
1992 they also had some other issues you don't have to rewind Advantage laser
disc but you do have to get up in the middle of your film to flip the disc
that is a real bummer and making matters worse for movies longer than 2 hours you
could be getting up not once but up to
three times to both flip and then change
discs now I see why this didn't take off
or did it there was a place where laser disk found a surprise ly strong footing
the Japan southeast Asia region and we
can't say exactly why it became popular there but we can say that there is one
feature that gets used a lot more there than in the west multiple audio tracks
in markets with a lot of cross- language cinema this was a major benefit of laser
dis but I can't be the whole story can it why not also Europe or South America
well because it wasn't just movies that were being
purchased on laser dis in Asia karaoke had spread rapidly across the continent
in the 70s and karaoke laser discs could
include vocals on a separate audio stream from the backing track which is
obviously kind of a big deal it also
supported inband closed captioning So lyrics could be toggled as they weren't
burned into the analog video and billboard magazine noted in 1992 that
40% of Japanese laser disc sales were
actually karaoke titles with there being roughly the same number of karaoke discs
available as there were movie releases so it was a perfect storm then of useful
features coupled with that resilience against high heat high humidity
environments you know what else is super resilient and challenging environments
the new stubby and multicolored screwdrivers from LTT Store.com do we
have a caraoke disc we don't have a karaoke disc today what we do have is a
couple different movies with director's commentary and a Hong Kong release of Sailor Moon
which includes kantes and Japanese audio oh it's going to have to be that this
makes me very uncomfortable removing these from the sleeves
um yeah that two twers job luckily laser
dis has a super cool feature or not feature so much as a quirk in that
because it's an analog recording like a record you can actually
see the grooves that are etched into the
disc it's not just pure shiny like C so
clearly this is the side with the
content oh that's hilarious that's why I
could see something on it because it does have video it just has a video of
there's no program material here this is
very unintuitive program material is recorded on the other side of this laser
disc is the reader on the top like a
record is the hold on now I now I need to know is the is the these are on top
or bottom it's got to be it's got to be on the bottom there's no way okay there
is a way I mean there were dual-sided players so you didn't have to we don't
have that though what I want to know is how quick and smooth it is to change the
track CX seems to be an audio cleanup feature that is separate from the
digital analog switch that I'm doing that on this particular disc also seems
to switch languages so CX isn't doing anything in this case it's a simple
toggle switch very convenient is the answer yeah one button and it's
seamless like honestly this is better than on a Blu-ray it really is this is
the best multilanguage experience I've
seen pretty cool coming back to North America for a moment though if laser dis
faced all of these headwinds what was it that made DVD and Blu-ray ultimately
succeed where LD failed the adoption of higher resolution
displays and the rise of Home Theater surely played a part but the real wave
for home adoption of each of those formats came from an often forgotten
line of Sony devices called PlayStations owners of ps2's and PS3s suddenly had
players for DVD and Blu-ray respectively whether they had intended to or not so
why didn't laser disc ever integrate gaming ah it did pioneer actually tried
a similar approach though not until the early '90s and in fact our very player
has a swappable expansion pack that turns the unit into a fully functional
region-free Sega Genesis and on top of being able to play standard cartridges
it could also Play Sega CD and the infrequently used Mega LD that's right
there's laser dis Sega Genesis games and
we've got one oh wow so it is basically
just a Sega Genesis
okay pack Port whoa no way laser active I mean
future obviously cuz that's where we're living we are about to experience
something really cool whoops okay just a second did I
just go flying off the track continue what it that was it I
just game over start again you can
actually hear the disc spinning faster
as I speed up and the playback of the full motion video background goes faster
this is because despite the physical similarities to CDs and DVDs the actual
video storage on a laser dis is analog
and you can really see this if you look closely at it next to a vinyl record
they've both got this kind of rings of Saturn effect that's because we're not
looking at little microsized Peaks and valleys that represent ones and zer that
get decoded to a file we are looking at variable sized Peaks and valleys that
translate to an analog waveform which is
wild crazy cool but a major disadvantage
when it comes to storage density on constant angular velocity laser discs
one revolution of the disc which happens at a fixed speed 1,00 RPM is one frame
video that means that the storage density of the outer edges was atrocious
this is one frame and also this is one frame and to reduce cross talk you can
only fit about 54,000 of these frames
per side that translates to about 30 minutes at 30 frames per second or I
guess you could play it back for longer if like you saw the video is playing
back slower and the disc is revolving
slower though of course movies would have no need to vary the speed of the
player or would they most films actually shipped using clv or
constant linear velocity where the storage density would be the same across
the entire surface which allows each disc to store an hour of video per side
but there were some disadvantages to this approach it did make the player
design more complex because now the rotational speed of the disc had to
change depending on which part the laser
was reading from the final way that movies were stored is constant angular
acceleration which is kind of a merger of the other two where instead of
running at a different speed for every
single line like clv multiple lines were grouped into
bands that would be read at 1 RPM each
even though it came at the cost of a little bit of storage density at the
outermost of each of these groupings if your brain hasn't exploded
already adding more confusion to this is that some film shipped with mostly clv
but Cav for some parts so that the
climax or the extra features could be better enjoyed as far as I can tell that
was mostly just marketing because there was no image quality difference and I
think it was more to do with that if there's only 20 minutes left in the film
once you've switched to the last disc whatever they might as well just use the
less efficient storage method enough about dis media for the moment let's put
a cartridge in this thing
oh hello oh wow that is uh kind of
ill-fitting all right let's see if we can upset that heartbreaking final come
on Cliff ronning let's go oh it's ban he
ah that was not a good move ber Jeff Corell though big Slap Shot H
terrible oh goodness oh goodness oh goodness just
about put it in my own net what the hell is the shoot button I can't figure out
how to shoot the puck oh it's C wow we
made it through an entire period I don't think I got a single shot on goal goalie
get stuck on that side of the net no okay interesting seriously my own guy my own
guy gets you know what forget it it doesn't matter frustration aside this
could have been great for adoption of laser disc like what the PlayStation
family did for DVD and Blu-ray but only
if the price was right the issue is that those PlayStation
consoles were $3500 at
launch this mama jama nearly $1,000 and
the Genesis pack was another $600 which
is a little confusing to me I mean a Sega Genesis at launch was
$170 a Sega CD was another 300 a
decently capable laser disc player could be bought for $400 how did the price double in there
there somewhere if this whole package had hit the market with more of a PS3
price we might have seen much wider adoption of not only laser disc but
perhaps the Genesis as well or not who knows but you know who knows about
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absolutely boom counts nope all right dang it okay one more one more play and
we got to keep going L now this video's over