Things that make you go Hmmm. Laserdisc Versus HDM - Page 3

Sony DADC USA didn't even have to bother with the perfect master as most of their disc have rotted away!

Yes, that's what I want to know. Does a 85/15 split just signal a decline in HD DVD sales and an overall decline in HDM? Is there any evidence of an increase in BD market-share?

I thought CED would survive as it was cheaper than LD and VHS. both software and hardware, with a huge selection of of movies from most studios were much better priced.

Now with LD I was much more skeptical as studio support was not all that great except for the major independents and MCA. But when Image/Pioneer started licensing movies from all those studios who didn't want the risk of releasing in a niche format things improved dramatically. The post IBM days with the introduction of "CD quality" PCM audio was what really made me stick with the LD format. Heck I didnt own a CD players for many years used the LD player.


LD players tough as a tank.. I dunno about that, just give it to UPS they will trash it in seconds!

I remember seeing AHD, and thought oh boy another audio format! At the time there was....

-ALP/VLP (early to mid 1970's) a 12" double sided disc similar to Laserdisc. Audio Long Play/Video Long Play stored as FM mod out.
-PCM recorders which would record on VHS/Beta tapes and reel to reel.
-PCM recorder that used analog compact audio cassettes.
-DAT prototypes in the early 1980's
-MO (forgot what it was called early 1980)similar to MiniDisc but on CD sized disc. not to be confused with CD-MO of the early 1990's.
-CDP format was Sony's early format of CD, but with a paper ring title area in the hub.

Is that really a factual and smart response? There is not a single person in the world that thinks that BD will be anywhere near SD now or in the imediate future. That is a huge hurdle that will take time. As for my statement, it was made in the context of BD vs HD. Im glad you decided to interject with an irrelevant and unecessary point.

My opinion is that HDM will likely achieve more success than LD. Both will remain 'niche', but I do see more push for HDM currently than I remember for LD in the late 80s to it's end. Note that I was too young (and not born) for the late 70s - mid 80s to note if things were different then. I do remember adverstisements for players in magazines, but that is about it.

The war at this time is only between HD DVD and BD and BD is winning big time. After that the winner (BD) will take on DVD. Also DVD sales were down something like 4% last year attributed in part to people waiting out the HDM war before investing.

hd-dvd has been winning since inseption ....
its the best working format ,
trying to kill hd-dvd against the consumers wishes by exclusive studios might not work.
I'm hoping blu will get called on this stunt !!

Bob

How do you justify that statement. BD has sold more STB's (Toshiba's CES numbers), game players, and has blown HD DVD out for over a year now in software sales each week (53-0). The last weeks ratio was 85% BD and 15% HD DVD. Hardly winning by any stretch. The facts across the board say BD is winning by a large margin.

Also if the consumers are buying 85% BD and only 15% HD DVD's (last week) aren't they (we) choosing?

???? Winning since inception? Where and How? Trying to kill hd-dvd against the consumers? The consumers have been choosing BD. Software numbers have shown it. Toshiba's declining SAL market. Is that a stunt? I keep getting infractions responding to these responses but the common sense in me can't just let uniformed responses sit unchallenged.

About the same as blu saying they won over and over again...
the mass consumer has not even bought in yet ....
get it??????

are you guys really for hd-dvd??
if not I might be in the on the wrong forum , if so excuse me.....

Bob

I don't see how the 85/15 argument really could be used to show how people have been choosing. It was around 60/40 from what I understand until the very recent Warner announcement. The publicity of that movie alone is what caused the 85/15...which now isn't likely to balance out in the future. There's really no other evidence to point to for why the numbers have shifted that much, that fast. 85/15 is just the reaction of customers to changes that weren't under their control.

Exhausted. Lock time.

BD losing, lock time.

yah , the consumer is shell shocked ...
I'm hoping they are smart shoppers and dont fall for the stunts and rhetoric...
this game is still not played out yet ....

If hd-dvd guys get scared and bail out on gueses, that is not helping either ...
look how the blue team soiled undies when Paramount went hd exclusive ...
Personally I'd like to see both formats survive , I dont want to ruin anyones
experience with the chosen format ...
A unit sold is a unit sold ...

Bob

Paramount and Universal own 2008. If they are still HD exclusive in 2009 people will be buying HD DVD to see their films.

You know, I've always heard that, but out of over 100 Sony pressed discs, not a single one has rotted - and just to see, I just now randomly selected 3 titles and scanned them - nope, no rot. I don't think it was a 'real' problem - I think it was a few, very vocal, users on the internet.

Don't forget TelDec's MiniDisk, which was a 4-inch disc (in a caddy) played with a piezo-electric-based diamond stylus. It was a direct application of thier TeD Videodisc system to digital audio storage - they submitted it to the DAD group as a possible digital audio standard too. It spawned the Teldec Direct Metal Mastering system for CD's.

And do you remember Compusonics? They, ahem, "planned" to introduce a consumer recordable digital audio disc system, that recorded 60 minutes per side on the 5-1/2 inch floppy disk! Later, it turned out that they had NO technology to sell - all thier demo's had been faked with a CD player providing the sound!

Philips ALP 'morphed' pretty quickly into the CD format - and in 1977, Pioneer and MCA were doing experimental work on a 14-bit digital audio disc system - that's why Pioneer's VP-1000 had the "Adaptor" output - just in case they ever actually released a product. It was nice though, because since the "adaptor" jack on the VP-1000 output the entire RF spectrum from the disc, including the raw audio carriers, it could be used as an AC-3 LD player with an AC-3 LD RF demodulator! Talk about future-proof!

Oh, at the DAT group also standardized "S-DAT" (as opposed to R-DAT) - it used the Philips Compact Cassette mechanism with 20-tracks - same sampling rate and bit-depth as DAT. Nothing ever came of it though, but Philips later morphed it into DCC with their PASC coding system.

BTW, I tried to upload a JAES technical paper from 1979 on the TelDec MiniDisk digital audio disc, but I can't get the PDF any smaller than 600k or so, which is too large for the forums. Bummer - it's a fun paper.

Didn't someone also have a proposal for a digital rectangular "card" that would sit still in the player and the laser would use a servo mirror focusing system to read the data?

rca had the ced disc ,
was vinyl (record)in a jacket , skipped a lot.
luckily laser was there to beat that one !!

I always forget about the TeD formats! As for audio mastering, I played around with a DASH system, but that's about it. I always thought S-DAT stood for Stationary DAT, R for Rotary? I forget. I know ADAT, Alesis DAT, S-VHS tapes!

I always felt like an idiot when using regular CD players in the early days. As figuring out how to put the disc in was always confusing. You have the top loaders, vertical drawer, tray with art up, tray with art down. I even remember one with a vertical slot load!!

That's a 3% sampling... You better go through all of them... You might have been checking out Sony discs that were pressed in Austria.

The Terra Haute plant was a disaster until the day the ceased LD pressings. I remember when the store I worked for picked up MIB. The initial 50 we received were perfect, and had been pressed at Pioneer. Of the next twenty we picked up, which were all from DADC, 13 went bad.

fitprod

My first ld was a top loader , used rental unit...
sold it for what I bought it for , then upgraded ....

There's no reason there couldn't be a secondary market for HD DVD releases. A transfer to digital can be pressed into either format. If studios opted for a generic HDi menu system (like Universal's) then it would cost them next to nothing to add an HD DVD production run.

Wouldn't that be ironic. The Blu-Ray release (provided it were profile 1.1 or higher) would be the feature rich version and the HD DVD release would be nothing more than a better picture / sound version of the SD DVD.

I just checked 4 more, including my very first DADC-US disc, the Criterion version of "Carrie" and the above mentioned MIB - all fine. Just checked my two Fantasia CAV sets too, both pressed by DADC-US and they are fine too. We have over 2000 discs, plus pretty much every MCA DiscoVision title ever made, including test pressings from 1976-77 and I can probably count on one hand the number of discs I've had go bad - Xanadu, Cujo, Thriller, and a few others - even one NOTORIOUS rotter, Olivia Newton-John Twist Of Fate, is perfect - Tony went through 5 copies back in the day and finally gave up on that disc! My original copy is still fine.

I've always wondered if living in the dry climate of New Mexico had anything to do with my luck with LD's? My partner Tony grew up in Missouri, where I now live, and he had terrible LaserRot problems. From reading early DiscoVision documents, if a disc had a chance to 'cure' for an EXTENDED period in a dry environment, it got more stable and less prone to degradation as time went on - maybe that's why I have been so lucky?

Yes, S-DAT = Stationary and R-Dat = Rotary. At the time, R-DAT was chosen as the "DAT" standard since it was so much easier to use VCR technology to record digital audio on tape. S-DAT was hampered by the lack of thin-film head technology. Oh, and do you remember, some Japanese company used DAT to make a video format? They called it 4mm video. Video Magazine tested a prototype '4mm' camcorder once and it was awful - they used VHS SLP FM allocation for around 200 lines! YIKES! Another small format was CVC from Funai and Technicolor.

A-DAT was pretty cool - I believe at one time Brad Miller of MoFi wanted to release his multi-track COLOSSUS recordings to consumers on either ADAT or Teac's DA-88 Video8-based format. At least he finally got to in the form of DTS-encoded CD's.

My first CD player was the Hitachi DA-1000, which loaded the disc like a toaster and had a clear window so you could watch it spin. That was one of the best sounding players of the day. My folks gave it to me for X-Mas 83.

I still want to find a working model of the first Magnavox CD player - the top-loader that looked like a mini Magnavision LD player. Sadly, those who have one either want too much for it or it's broken! I also want one of Mitsubishi's old front-projection console big-screen sets - the ones with the fold-out mirror and doors that closed over the front-projection screen and looked like a hutch when closed up. If the tubes are shot, I'll put an LCD projector in the place of the center tube and make it HD!

Do you think HD-DVD could become a 'bootleg' format via China, like VCD and SVCD? If HD-DVD dies everywhere else but China, I doubt Toshiba and others will pay much attention to the CH-HD-DVD format to make sure it stays on the up-n-up. If Toshiba were to get low-cost HD-DVD PC burners on the market, and cheap recordable media, it could become a great format for, um, HD movie "trading" - especially with people with access to firewire-based sattelite systems and D-VHS units.

I'm suprised there are no bootleg HD-DVD discs of MUSE LD movies floating around yet - I really thought we'd see those pretty quickly - stuff like Jurassic Park that isn't on HD presently. I've wanted to see them just to see the quality of MUSE Hi-Vision LD titles. I've never seen MUSE 'in-person' - only studied it via books and technical papers.

http://www.thevintageknob.org/DAD/DA1000/DA1000.html

Over the last year I've read endless posts from both sides declaring that two formats were significantly holding back HD adoption. Your presuming I expect Blu-ray to take on DVD, I do not. I simply expect some evidence in market-share that the Warner decision has spurred BD disk sales, even to the degree of one-half a point in the broader market. There are surely enough drives (via the PS3) out there, that it's reasonable to expect some sort of tangible increase in disk sales if the WB decision has instilled confidence in the format. No?

Dropping the bottom out of the HD DVD market isn't a win, unless blu-ray at least has the momentum to displace it. Otherwise all we have is a decrease in HDM sales.