LaserDisc: The 1978 Analog Format That Paved the Way for CD and DVD

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In December 1978, in Atlanta, Georgia, MCA launched a home video format called DiscoVision with Jaws as its first title. It arrived two years after VHS and four years before the audio CD, and it read a 12 inch disc with a laser. The earliest players used a glass tube filled with helium neon gas. Yet the format was analog: the microscopic pits and lands on the disc modulated a continuous wave, with light acting as a needle that never touched the surface. The result was 425 to 440 lines of resolution against roughly 240 for VHS, and no wear from playback.

This episode explains why a format so far ahead never won the American living room, and why it mattered anyway. Discs weighed half a pound, held at most 60 minutes per side, could not record television, and cost over $5 each to press when a VHS tape cost about $1. But LaserDisc gave film lovers frame by frame control, surround sound, and the first special editions, found devoted markets abroad, and funded the optical research that later formats relied on.

• CAV discs spun at a constant 1,800 revolutions per minute with one frame per rotation, allowing perfect freeze frames but only 30 minutes per side. CLV discs slowed toward the outer edge to fit 60.
• The Criterion Collection used the format to create the special edition, releasing Citizen Kane with supplementary materials and King Kong with the first audio commentary track.
• Collectors feared laser rot, in which impurities in the glue joining a disc's two sides slowly oxidized the reflective aluminum layer and filled the picture with speckles.
• By 1999 the format had reached 10 percent of Japanese households. Its instant seeking powered the 1983 arcade game Dragon's Lair and Lucasfilm's EditDroid, an early nonlinear editing system.
• The last North American release was Bringing Out the Dead in late 2000, and Pioneer stopped making players in July 2009.