I have always been fascinated by LaserDisc technology. Long before I had seen a video played from a disc, and shortly after I had listened to my first album on CD, I had the opportunity to watch movies in LD.
It was in a home theater system that belonged to a friend of my father’s, connected to a rear-projection television and a powerful stereo speaker that made the floor rumble. Consider that our family TV was a 20-inch model with a mono speaker and you can imagine why this impressed me. But LaserDisc never went mainstreamand we go directly from vhs tapes to DVD.
LaserDisc was part of a different format war than VHS
But that was his strength.
One of my favorite YouTubers, Technological connectionsmade a great video about the failure of LaserDisc almost a decade ago.
In it he points out that LaserDisc suffered from poor synchronization and an audience that was not entirely prepared for what it offered. People didn’t really understand the concept of watching movies at home. It’s not that LaserDisc was necessarily very expensive. He notes that VHS was more expensive than LaserDisc at the time of release.
What mattered was that LaserDisc was always focused on being the video equivalent of buying a vinyl record. That’s how it was sold to people. VHS, on the other hand, solved the problem of capturing television broadcasts for later viewing. The idea of purchasing pre-recorded movies on a non-recordable VHS came about later, after the proverbial foot of technology was firmly in the door.
So from the beginning, and honestly to this day, LaserDisc is a format that appeals to a specific group of moviegoers, even if its creators would have preferred it to become a mainstream hit.
It already had a built-in “collector culture.”
All the good things hidden up their sleeves.
From the beginning, LaserDisc movies were packaged for people who loved movies and were looking for a way to collect them. Until then, the only real option was to buy a home projector and play movies at an incredible cost. If you think building a home theater is expensive now, in the 1960s and 1970s, you’d have to be a real millionaire for this kind of luxury.
LaserDiscs were the beginning of Criterion Collection films; Long before DVDs, there were LaserDiscs with bonus features included on bonus discs, with liner notes and commentaries. Most people didn’t care about movies more than something to do on a Friday night, but the studios that brought their movies to this new format clearly had more than an idea of the intended audience.
Now you could create a movie collection in the same way that people collect books or records. His own entertainment librarythat you can enjoy in private.
The quality gap really mattered (for a while)
everything is relative
When VHS finally managed to bring movies into the home through rental or purchase, the quality gap between the two formats was incredibly large.
I don’t even have to delve into my childhood memories, as today I have commercial movies on VHS and LaserDisc to watch. LaserDisc has twice the resolution of VHS and far superior sound, often reaching CD quality. There is no rewinding, the discs do not wear out with use and you can skip directly to the chapter you want.
I even have one of the latest players that can play both sides of a LaserDisc without needing to rotate it manually! If you took care of your discs, the quality would remain consistent, and decades later it was worth it when I analyzed the wear and tear on my VHS titles compared to our LDs.
The collector’s promise on LDs was definitely fulfilled. While disc rot is a rare but real thing, people who bought LaserDisc copies of movies 40 years ago could realistically still watch and enjoy them today. The only reason for leaving LD was that DVD and later Blu-ray offered much better quality. The technology did not fail; It was simply surpassed.
Which vinyl turned out well and LaserDisc didn’t?
Master self-deception
DVDs and BDs are based on LDs, at least in spirit, if not technologically. However, they don’t benefit from vinyl’s (undeserved) mystique, which has helped it survive and even thrive among audiophiles. Vinyl fans might fool themselves into believing that vinyl sounds better than modern high-quality digital, but the same trick won’t work with LaserDisc.
LaserDisc has its charms and warm analog appearance, but no sane person could claim that its image quality is in any way better than DVD. So LaserDisc won’t become the video equivalent of vinyl, but it will remain the only format in which some films are still preserved, and for those incredible covers with art and information that may not exist anywhere else.
