I picked up a Laserdisk player and about 50 random discs at a garage sale last year. Sadly I haven't gotten much use out of it but it's certainly an "interesting thing". The sheer size *and weight* of the media does sort of blow your mind.
Probably the most interesting disc in my collection is the CAV-mode "Criterion Collection" version of Akira. It's somewhat unwieldy to actually watch the movie since CAV only does 30 minutes per side, necessitating *two* physical disk swaps (which would be four if the auto side-swap on the player didn't work), but it's the mode that offers "perfect" freeze-frame with no crosstalk or motion blur. (I'm not nearly enough of an Anime fan to be stoked over the idea of repeatedly pausing and drooling over individual frames of Akira but apparently a market existed for that.) The last disc in the set has a "Special Feature" which consists thousands of pieces of pencil tests, concept art, etc, (including an an issue of the Manga) encoded as individual frames, which you navigate by putting the player into "pause" mode and shuffling from frame to frame.
Oddly I *don't* have a copy of Star Wars.
Probably the most interesting disc in my collection is the CAV-mode "Criterion Collection" version of Akira. It's somewhat unwieldy to actually watch the movie since CAV only does 30 minutes per side, necessitating *two* physical disk swaps (which would be four if the auto side-swap on the player didn't work), but it's the mode that offers "perfect" freeze-frame with no crosstalk or motion blur. (I'm not nearly enough of an Anime fan to be stoked over the idea of repeatedly pausing and drooling over individual frames of Akira but apparently a market existed for that.) The last disc in the set has a "Special Feature" which consists thousands of pieces of pencil tests, concept art, etc, (including an an issue of the Manga) encoded as individual frames, which you navigate by putting the player into "pause" mode and shuffling from frame to frame.
Oddly I *don't* have a copy of Star Wars.