Originally Posted by Chris Frost:
“There are plenty of serious film collectors who still own players and large disc collections. Several of my customers fall in to that category.
The discs to own were the US and Japanese imports. They had DD or DTS soundtracks. The dynamic range on those discs often blew DVD in to the weeds. The UK releases had ProLogic sound. There were also the films released on Laser that either never made it to DVD or had really bad DVD transfers.”
I got rid of my player and discs early in 1998 as soon as I connected my first dvd player to the tv and saw what it had to offer.
Fortunately I got good prices as it was still sometime before most people got into dvd.
To me the DD/DTS issue was not important.
IIRC it was 1993 before any LD had DD sound and even later for DTS so within a couple of years dvd was out in Japan and the writing was on the wall for LD.
A few years back I got tired of waiting for a handful of films aswell as the Star Trek cartoons to come out on dvd so I bought the discs and a player from ebay , copied all the discs to dvd then sold the lot on again.
Of course all the LD I copied are now out on dvd although the MOD of House of the Long Shadows seems to have come from the LD master so buying the official dvd was pointless and I kept the LD transfer.
While most UK punters were shelling out on crappy VHS tapes LD collectors were wallowing in superior sound and pictures aswell as bonus features and commentaries that VHS buyers didn't even know existed.
It was a great time . The 80's did bring some woeful transfers but by the early 90's when Pioneer gave us players to play NTSC discs aswell the studios were dishing out good quality discs.
Only ever bought one Japanese disc . It was £60 but the idea they were superior quality was a myth.
Japanese dvd's are equally over priced to UK/US discs and are also no better
I do miss the packaging though in the same way I miss vinyl packaging