Things that make you go Hmmm. Laserdisc Versus HDM - Page 2

afiak it was only supported with new blank media and some very basic players during the last 10/12 odd years of its life. It certainly wasn't supported with decent releases from any major Hollywood studio's. I'd also say that betamax was the exception, rather than the norm because Sony's broadcast version, Betacam was very VERY popular for TV stations so it was probably only a small cost to continue to produce home betamax equipment.

I was able to get a bd player from BB for $269 (w/ 7 free dvds) prior to Christmas...and no, not a open box, factory sealed. It sits proudly on top of my a2 (which, when it dies of natural causes, will take its place next to my 8 track and cassette player in the hall of fame). CC had similar deals. Refurbs were being sold for $179. You have to watch for sales.
It's time for the mourning process to end, move on with life...many have.

LD wasn't really 'killed off' - it was flat-out abandoned by the vast majority of LaserDisc owners. Towards the end, new LD releases were being pressed in quantities of less than 400 because there were simply no more orders than that... Universal Studio's required pre-orders for any particular 'new release' to reach 350 before they would go ahead and press the disc, yet even a 'big' title on LD, a major new release, such as "Erin Brokovich" couldn't meet that goal. The pre-order's for "Erin..." were less than 250. Pioneer (and 3M) both stated they would continue to make/release discs as long as the numbers were there - they clearly wern't. Universal's last US LD release, "End Of Days", was sold for, what, $34.95 retail? With the downturn in sales and increases in mastering/replication prices, that disc SHOULD have sold for well over $150 for Universal to make money on it. That's why Paramount dropped AC-3 support - it took extra time and added extra cost to the disc replication/production - for a title that's selling for $24.95, it clearly wasn't worth it. So, they stopped releasing.

The dramatic down-turn in sales clearly came as a suprise to Pioneer and Image. They did not expect that to happen so quickly - I constantly heard analogies to the LP, that LD would be around as a 'niche' market for quite a long time. Due to the severe difficulty in pressing a 'good' LD though, obviously, that could never happen on a small scale.

Too bad, you were rather foolish. You could have gotten a brand new Toshiba HD A3 DVD player at Amazon right now with 7 free movies and free shipping for $130.00 . Do you still think you got a deal?

But according to Toshiba, they only have 49% of the market. Wasnt that as high as 60% a few months back. I think there are bit more BD players being sold and the PS3 as well.

It didn't come as a surprise to many others. DVD was clearly superior in convenience and PQ/AQ. It supported wide screen TVs and didn't require disc flipping or a massive player. DVD made LD as obsolete as the audio cassette.

I believe that nowadays the exclusive support of studios are all paids by Toshiba and Sony to pull the formats.

When to leave of being paid, I see good possibility of estudios to launch headings in HD-DVD, therefore I perhaps find that HD-DVD still goes to be around for a long time in hardwares, perhaps in xbox next gen...., etc

Is not a expontaneus support on BD side, except Sony studios.

Why I see this morning in my Sunday paper that Samsung has just released a new combo player that plays both HD and BD. That ought to start Sony to howling. I wonder how one counts such a sale, is it for HD or BD.

Why do people think this? Betamax and the professional Betacam system had NOTHING, except for the size of the shell, in common with each other (which was only used for the "small" version of Betacam - the larger tape shell was more along the lines of VHS). Transports and electronics were completely different - they had nothing to share. Betacam units couldn't even play or use Betamax tapes. Sony even abandoned the much-vaunted "U-Load" threading mechanism in most Betacam systems, opting for the more-compact and less persnickity M-Load.

Back in the 'heyday' of the VHS/Beta format war, Sony's, uh, strategies were certaily werid. They flooded the market with a huge number of low-end "EZ-Beta" units - some with only 5-dollar price differences. And they stabbed Zenith in the back so many times that Zenith finally felt the need to cut their losses and defect out of the Beta camp. Sony's response to Super-VHS was pathetic - ED-Beta was a dog of a format - ooooh, 500 (ahem) lines of resolution with 30 lines of color, complete with too high a price - too exciting! They steadfastly refused to produce a Betamovie with in-unit playback and electronic viewfinder, despite the fact that those features were causing VHS VideoMovie units, both small and full-size, to sell like gang-busters. That's why Sanyo dropped Betamovie support after only a few years. Oh, and the Marantz high-end Dolby-C Linear Stereo Betamax unit - Sony really, really shafted Marantz on that one, not disclosing to Marantz that Beta Hi-Fi was due to be introduced in a few months. It cost Marantz so badly that they never produced another Beta unit.

In terms of pre-recorded movies though, you could get pre-recorded tapes of every new release up until 1993 or so. You might have to pre-order or special order it, but you COULD get them. And, after Super Beta came out, all prerecorded Beta Hi-Fi tapes were recorded with a compatible 'version' of Super Beta, giving them a better picture than their VHS counterparts. It wasn't the full SuperBeta carrier shift, but it was better than standard Beta and VHS. That's one of the few things Sony did right! Oh, and they did treat their original one-hour Betamax owners wonderfully, flat-out giving them the mechanical BetaStack tape changer. That's one thing, as a VHS owner, I always envied about Beta owners, was the BetaStack units. They were too cool!

It came as a suprise to them because they, rather naively, thought LD owners would support the format, out of 'love' alone! I was a shareholder in IMAGE Entertainment at the time, and from reading their letters to shareholders about the market, they really did believe this, as did Pioneer - just go back and read Pioneer's statements in old issues of Widescreen "DTS" Review.

The audio Compact Cassette was killed for me the day I bought a Sony DAT recorder. Then MiniDisc came along and I loved the format. At the time of MiniDisc's introduction, Philips had the entire industry, both electronics and music, wipped into a frenzy of belief that the DCC (Digital Compact Cassette) would be the blockbuster successor to the analog Compact Cassette. Crazy!

Dual Format players are old news (and a nacihe market). The Samsung unit has two problems, it costs almost twice as much as an equivalent Blu-Ray player and it is built by Samsung who is not earning a sterling reputation for glitch free players and timely firmware updates.

I still think it's quite impressive, especially considering Toshiba is the ONLY company making HD-DVD players! One company and their players up against the Blu-ray companies, who are all making/selling players. HD-DVD hasn't done bad at all.

Samsung?

Toshiba probably still believes that HD-DVD can succeed as a format. Human's possess amazing powers of denial.

I would love to have a high-quality Dual-Format player, but my A2 is completely glitch free, and I see no reason to trade that for a dual player that has as many problems as the Samsung does with BOTH BD and HDVD titles. At one time I really, really hoped that Pioneer would make wonderful dual-format HD player, like they did back in the LD days with CD and DVD. My 1997 Pioneer DVL-700 DVD/LD/CD combi-player still plays every DVD I can throw at it. And it's never even had a firmware update! And, unlike 'today's' DVD players, it will output 24-bit 96k PCM over SPDIF regardless of the copyright bits set on the disc. Plus, it has Pioneer's wonderful Legato Link conversion built-in.

I remember when RCA pulled the plug on the SelectaVision CED VideoDisc, there were CED owners who TRULY believed that some company would come along and step in and buy up the CED system and 'save' it, like Pioneer Video did when they bought the Carson, CA LaserDisc pressing plant from Discovision Associates in March 1981. The MCA/IBM pull-out and Discovision Associates plant shut-down was a true death-blow to the format and if Pioneer hadn't stepped in, the LD format would have died right then and there - but Pioneer saved it and eternal optimists thought something along those lines would happen with the CED system too! However, unlike LD, which had great room for enhancement, RCA had pushed the CED system to its technological limits just to get 240 lines of luma and 30 lines of chroma on a disc. There was no room for 'expanding' anything. If 'saved', the CED format would have been forever stuck with its 1974 system specifications.

How about a 85/15 sales ratio last week (the biggest difference so far) and over 52 straight weeks of higher sales. Maybe that would help you see that BD is IN FACT winning.

Price match to walmart, new a2, $99 w/ 5 free movies prior to thanksgiving. Watch for sales.

Strange that you should find cost a relative factor since BD machines cost twice as much as HD machines.

Well, it is the cheaper player, with more features, that still has industry support, with disks that can be manufactured without expensive AACS, and is starting off with a 1 million installed base.

There was no comparing the CED system to Laserdisk. CED was clearly the inferior system. Laserdisk was an excellent system but when DVD came out it was, without a doubt, the better system. Now BD vs HD is not so clear cut.

Actually similar analogies can be made. CED was promoted as being cheaper and easier than LD. You could modify existing LP lines to press the CED discs. With LD you had to build new multi million dollars facilities. The CED electronics were more off the shelf and cheaper to manufacture so players were less than 1/2 the price and sold at lower end retailers. If I remember correctly RCA was the only manufacture of hardware (maybe some OEM rebadged GE's?). While LD had several manufactures in the game. LD plants had low yields and were rumored to never be able to work out the problems. How about them apples for comparaisons

No, Sanyo, Hitachi and Toshiba all made their own CED players and OEM'd them too.

LD mastering, even up to the very end, was a hit-or-miss affair - if you look at the mint markings on discs you'll see that some times it might take up to 72 tries to get a good master for a single side!

The very first MCA DiscoVision discs were pressed on modified LP presses - but that quickly changed as MCA struggled to improve yields from their 90% reject rate and went to the injection molding process MCA engineer John Winslow developed... then MCA discovered that rigid injection molded discs had SEVERE environmental stability problems - and that bonding discs together to make a double-sided 2x disc (2.5mm thick) made the stability problems even worse. That's why Philips never developed a double-sided CD. Interestingly, the 'thin', 'floppy' 6-10 mil discs (MCA's preferred disc format until 1977) never had the pressing or environmental stability problems like the 'thick' 1.2mm discs did. Even bonding two of them together didn't cause the same sorts of problems! But, for playback, a clear, plexiglass 'correction plate' was required to play them on a player that was also capable of playing thick, rigid discs. Plus, the thin floppy laserdiscs were less forgiving of fingerprints and such. Not to mention a crease in one would cause un-reparable harm or the aluminum coating to crack.

On the CED side, once RCA switched to a vinyl disc impregnated with carbon-black particles, their yeilds were on the order of 90%, right from the start with simple compression molding techniques. And with the switch to electro-mechanical master cutting (as opposed to electron beam), it could only take two tries to get a perfect master disc to make stampers.

It's over guys. I liked the underdog from day one. It was a cinderella story but IMO HDDVD did not play to win. The marketing and brain washing in the big box stores was half hearted ill advised and very very poorly implemented all along. I actually thought that some decisive event was still at least six months off but Warner ended it.

Art

Sad thing is, Toshiba will claim they 'tried really hard'. Yeah, right.

A little OT but you seem to be knowledgeable. Back when CD was being considered (by the CEA?) for replacement for the LP didn't RCA have a proposal for a 12" digital LP that could be made using CED technology (including caddy)? How bad would that have been if it was adopted instead?

That would have been a lot harder to use in cars, computers and portable players!

I lived through all that too and almost forgot how all that went down. Great post!

No, that was JVC with their VHD VideoDisc - the audio-only counterpart was AHD (Audio High Density). VHD/AHD discs were only 10-inches in diameter. AHD was 16-bit, 48kHz sampling and had 4 discrete channels with 60 min per side. Any channel could be replaced with digital still images. Suprisingly, AHD was selected by the Digital Audio Disc Committee (DADC) in Japan as the digital audio disc 'standard' - IN ADDITION TO the Philips/Sony CD format! The DAD group preferred the AHD system but couldn't resist the idea of a small, cute and cuddly optical format. So, BOTH were selected and given the 'OK' for manufacture! VHD/AHD actually had more company support, even in America, but due to poor videodisc showings in the marketplace, the VHD/AHD introduction was held back and finally scrapped completely in America.

JVC then adapted AHD to computer storage and re-dubbed it 'Advanced High Density' - each 10-inch AHD disc could store 2.6 gigs of data per side. And since every VHD Video Disc player had a full-featured adapter port, every player could be turned into a PC ROM drive with an AHD adapter. JVC did some REALLY awsome VHD-PC games for the MSX computer system in Japan.

BTW, as compared to RCA's CED VideoDisc format, JVC's VHD performed BEAUTIFULLY. I have 2 VHD players and numerous discs - they don't skip or have drop-outs, nor do they wear out like CED since the discs had no grooves and the stylus was flat with 10 times the contact area of CED. Random access is fast and picture quality is really good - VHD had a luma bandwidth of 3.1-MHz and chroma bandwidth of .5-MHz, so compared to LD it wasn't great, but it blows VHS, Beta and CED out of the water. And, compared to LD's at the time (with poor pressings), it really would have been strong competition had it been released in the USA. Oh, and every disc had full special effects and random access - no CAV/CLV modes. Plus, it offered fully compatible field-sequential 3D from any player - you just needed an adapter! Even the 3D discs would play back in 2D if you didn't have a 3D adapter. And it was true Field-Sequential 3D, not the nasty red/blue kind.

Here's a link to the AHD part of my VHD "Discworld" website.
http://disclord.tripod.com/vhddiscworld/id12.html

BD isn't winning - standard def dvd is winning bigger than ever.
As small a niche as optical media based high def is - it will simply get smaller if HD-DVD dies. Warner may have struck a huge blow for standard def dvd's and upconverting players (which HD-DVD players handle superbly).