Pioneer bids adieu to the late, great LaserDisc

It never came close to dethroning VHS, but LaserDisc survived—nay, thrived—as a proud niche format, and it paved the way for all those DVD special features that we take for granted.

Frankly, I'm less surprised that Pioneer is halting LaserDisc player production than by the fact that it's still churning them out. As this Register Hardware story reports, there hasn't been a new LaserDisc title in the U.S. in eight years—seven years in Japan—and I'd assumed that manufacturers had stopped building LaserDisc decks some time ago.

But as it turns out, Pioneer still makes them—and will, indeed, crank out another 3,000 players before shutting down production lines for good, according to Register Hardware.

I have to say, I still carry a torch for LaserDisc, a 30+-year-old format that was the premier choice for videophiles (not to mention Karaoke fanatics) until the DVD format arrived in 1997.

I bought my first LaserDisc player back in 1995 or '96—I'm pretty sure it was this one, the Pioneer CLD-S104—and compared to VHS, it was a revelation. My first two LaserDiscs were the letterboxed editions of "The Empire Strikes Back" (the original, thanks very much) and "Pulp Fiction," and my collection gradually grew from there.

In addition to the improved picture quality, I found something else new on my LaserDisc movies. They were called "extras," or "supplements": Deleted scenes, trailers, documentaries, and even "commentary tracks" with the directors, writers, and actors. The first commentary track I ever heard: "The Usual Suspects," probably circa 1996, and I thought it was a brilliant idea.

And then there was (and still is) the Criterion Collection, a home video label that churned out gorgeous—and expensive—special edition versions of classic movies, old and new. (My five-disc, CAV edition of "Seven" from Criterion cost a cool $99, and I was more than happy to pay up.)

Of course, one of the biggest problems with the 12-inch LaserDisc platters was that you could only fit about 60 minutes of video per side (or only about 30 minutes for "standard" CAV LaserDiscs, which offered features like freeze frame and "variable" fast-forward/reverse), meaning you had to flip the disc at least once (or even load additional discs) for feature films.

Still, I was wary of the burgeoning DVD format, especially after seeing the muddy resolution and static backgrounds on the earliest, poorly mastered discs. I hedged my bets with Pioneer's LD/DVD combo deck, the DVL-909, which cost me a whopping $800 (or even $900??) back in 1998.

But it wasn't long before the sharper resolution (and convenience) of DVD won me over, any when I finally moved from San Francisco to New York in 2002, I left my DVL-909—and all my LaserDiscs (including my beloved Criterion editions of "Seven" and "Dead Ringers", plus two sets of "Star Wars" discs) behind. (Note to the good buddy I left my LD collection with: You've still got all those discs safely in storage, right?)

Anyway … what were we talking about? Right: LaserDisc, dead, but lived a long, fruitful life as a niche product. Who knows—maybe we'll be saying the same thing about Blu-ray one day (and hey, that's not a bad thing).

Related:
Pioneer calls a halt to LaserDisc hardware production [Register Hardware]