@MadCrazy: I'm assuming that this stems from the "Technological superpower" comment. Grimace as much as you like from across the pond, it's not an exaggeration.

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+1 I have the same model, sitting in my bedside table, waiting for a run. Of course I will never install that god-aweful sony software again, so i'm stuck with the music I listened to in 8th/10th grade.

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Seriously? Outdated? What outdated Laserdisc a minute after they came out? VHS? DVD's were barely a pipe dream at this point. MD's weren't outclassed until MP3 players came out.

There's a difference between "Outdated" and "sold miserably in North America". Both techs were technologically superior to anything available.

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The discs themselves were huge and cumbersome, which makes disc-killing scratches a persistent danger. And given theose sky-high prices, and the fact that these came stored in sleeves rather than proper cases, it was a tough pill to swallow for most people.

Short runtimes were a mood-killer. Where DVD can get a movie that runs over three hours on a single dual-layer read surface, and VHS could handle about 2.5 hours on an extra-long tape, laserdiscs could only fit about half an hour per side (the extended edition of Lord of the Rings would require 13 double-sided LDs, and that's just for the movies w/ audio commentaries...and buying TV series on LD would require special high-strength flooring).

Finally (and I witnessed this first-hand), the sheer size and weight of these discs created problems that most DVD-owners simply aren't aware of. I had a college film class where the professor rented a laserdisc title out of Chicago. Imagine his (and our) surprise when he stepped up in front of the class and pulled the laserdisc out of the sleeve...to find a hole the size of a quarter punched through the the read surface. Yeah, all that extra weight and size makes it a lot easier to cause catastrophic incidental damage.

In addition to all of those things, I suspect that, due to skipping problems that aren't as much of an issue on DVDs, Laserdiscs were probably set up for a read profile similar to a vinyl record, where you start at one point and simply read in a spiral until the track ends. Put a scratch on the disc, and it's like dropping a brick in the path of ants that are returning to the nest. DVDs split the data up into chunks that are non-adjacent, so even if you lose one chunk, a good player can simply skip to the next one.

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I remember back when I was about 10 y/o or so and saw my first LD player I asked, "can you record on it?" When I found out that the answer was "no", I didn't want one anymore.

Despite relative low quality with VHS, the fact is that you just had to buy one machine to both play videos from the store and to record your own (and to play back home movies, too).

And remember the quality of the average TV back then? It wasn't exactly killer, and so comparing VHS to Laserdisc wasn't quite so dramatic. (I'm talking about the average home here, not the videophile's home theater).

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