R.I.P. Laserdisc
We used to be like a secret society that held the key to
video Valhalla. While the VHS videocassette revolutionized the way people used their
televisions, those of us who had been seduced by the lure of the laserdisc could only pity
those who were stuck with the fuzzy pictures tapes usually offered.
And while some were inclined to mutter darkly about the
dark forces that pushed VHS, to the exclusion of the vastly superior Beta, those of us who
were paid to write about such things knew that Beta had virtually no technical edge over
VHS, while the laserdisc made tape seem like watching TV through a screen door.
The disc had a rough ride from the start. Philips came up
with the technology in the early 1970s, but didn't have a real product to sell for almost
a decade. It went nowhere at that time, and even its developer dropped out of the market.
Only Pioneer really had faith in the technology, and kept players available for years
after everybody else forgot about it.
For one thing, its vastly superior picture quality was
invisible on most of the TV sets of the day. As an experiment, many years later I mounted
an A-B comparison between a laserdisc and the same movie on a well-mastered VHS cassette,
played through a mid-'70s premium television.
When I bought that set many years ago, it was my pride and
joy, and one of the few sets that had any claim to high-quality performance (oh, okay, it
was a Sony Trinitron). Input was strictly by antenna, however, and things like comb
filters were unknown, so in reality, its picture was pretty poor by later standards. And
the higher quality of the laserdisc was only just discernible, and certainly no
justification for the cost of the player.
The cost of the discs was a moot point, because hardly any
were available. And laserdisc suffered from being a playback-only system. It's not that
many people were all that keen to record things, although the video industry imagined they
were, but that was about the only way you could build up a library of movies and other
programs.
Only when Hollywood realized that video was a gold mine,
and the industry settled into its pattern of issuing movies for rent and sale were there
enough available to make owning a laserdisc player worthwhile.
Eventually, TV monitors improved to the point that you
could easily see the advantage of the disc. When I did that experiment with my old
Trinitron, I repeated it with a mid-'90s monitor, and the differences were dramatic.
The arrival of "combi" players meant that most
laserdisc machines could also play CDs. That was irrelevant to most users, because the
majority of people watched movies in one room and listened to music in another, but it did
mean that the movie companies could add a digital surround-sound track without
compromising the compatibility of the discs or players.
Ultimately, the laserdisc became the medium of choice for
many of the most dedicated home-theater fans, but that still didn't make it more than a
niche product.
As with most new technologies, I first encountered the disc
at trade shows, and given the less-than-ideal circumstances of most such demonstrations, I
wasn't very impressed. It may also have been that such demos usually involved car crashes
and explosions, which didn't look all that bad on tape.
When I began reviewing players with some regularity,
however, my mind changed. Coupled with really good TV monitors, the players and discs of
the day could create stunningly good pictures. The main problem was finding discs to play.
Videophiles in major cities had lots of selection, of
course, but for people like me, living in the burbs or beyond, finding material to feed
the players was hard.
At one point, I found four shops within a reasonable drive
from my house that rented laserdiscs. None of them had very many titles, but there were
enough for me to use in product evaluations. The scarcity became more distressing when I
bought a player, rather than relying on loaners from manufacturers. Too often I had to
choose between a marginally interesting movie on disc and something that I really wanted
to see, but which was available only on tape. Usually I chose the tape.
Strangely, even though I'm normally a pack rat when it
comes to recorded media, I collected hardly any laserdiscs. I had a few test and demo
discs, of course, but I probably bought only half a dozen program discs of any
kind.
Even rentals became harder to locate. The four local stores
dropped to one, and I had seen every disc I was remotely interested in at least once. New
acquisitions were very rare; then there were none at all.
When that store embraced DVD, all its laserdiscs were put
on a rack over to one side, with a $20 price tag on each one. The store was no longer
interested in renting these, but I wasn't interested in dropping twenty bucks a pop for
them either. Then, one day, a new sign appeared: the discs were now going for $7 each, or
five for $25.
That seemed like a better deal to me, so I picked out five
moderately interesting items, just to flesh out my meager disc collection. The manager
offered me the whole rack -- maybe 100 discs -- for $100, but I had enough trouble just
finding five that I wanted, so I declined the offer.
The next day, however, I did decide there was one more I
wanted and was willing to shell out five bucks for, so I went back to get it. The store
was gone, along with the remaining laserdiscs.
It's rare that you can tell that an era is ending, but for
me, as I stared at that empty store, the laserdisc age ended on July 5, 2000.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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