"S888Wheel" wrote in message

I said


So why didn't laser disc take off?


Arny said


Initially, LDs were crap, which cast a pall on the whole product.

I totally disagree. They offered vastly superior performance to VHS
from the get go.

Let's run the numbers. Sockpuppet wheel says that he was just out of college
when he bought his first CD player, but the CD player he bought wasn't one
of the first two on the market. So, he was just out of college say in 1984
or later. In contrast, the LD was introduced in 1977, per this article:
http://www.mindspring.com/~laserguru/popsci.htm . This was about 7 years
earlier, when sockpuppet wheel was just apparently just getting into high
school. Just guessing here, but sockpuppet wheel might not have gotten into
LDs until they were on the market for 3-5 years or more.

In contrast, at the time of the introduction of the LD I was in my mid-30's.
I had a close friend who was an early adopter of LD. He bought one of the
first LD players available in the city. I seem to recall that he bought a
Phillips/Magnavox player and it was really bad. He took it back in a little
while, and got a Pioneer player which was marginally acceptable. The major
problems were skipping, repeats, and glitches in the video even when there
was no skipping or repeating. Shades of vinyl!

I subsequently got a detailed running commentary on the technical issues
related to LDs because GM decided to release a lot of technical material on
LDs. Early on, a LD production facility was built in Detroit. Its chief
engineer was a person who remains a close friend to this day. He vents a
lot! This LD plant was said to be the first independent (not built with
direct help from Sony or Phillips) LD plant in the world. He had a lot to
vent about.

LDs are inherently far more difficult and expensive to make than CDs or DVDs
simply because they are so large, and because they are composed of two
pieces of plastic bonded together, back-to-back. By the time CDs were
introduced, the whole process of making and playing LDs was working quite
nicely, as it should given the timing.

Making CDs was maybe an order of magnitude easier than making LDs, all
things considered. That's one reason why the CD intro was as smooth as it
was. Most of the serious technical battles were fought and won with LDs, and
then they scaled the product way down and made it even easier to make and
play.