The Survey (2007) Introduction : from mid-December 2007 to mid-January 2008, an online survey was conducted on LDDb.com, requesting opinions and insights on the website from its users. 225 usable answers were collected and their analysis is presented below. If you were one of these 225, thank you very much for taking the time to answer all these questions! Video Players (hardware) My first concern was to check what kind of video players are out there (regardless of their commercial obsolescence) to align LDDb. The results are as follows: 98.64% 97.30% 100% 90% 80% 75.13% 70% 60% 50% 40.12% 40% 30% 26.14% 21.19% 20% 8.61% 8.16% 10% 1.38% 0.69% 0% DVD LD VHS S-VHS HD-DVD Blu-Ray CED D-VHS W-VHS VHD Chart 1: Video Players Technologies It was not really a surprise that most LDDb users do own a Laserdisc player :-) It also confirmed that most people were using (just like I do) both a DVD and a LD player together (sometimes as a Pioneer Combo Player). VHS is still largely owned but probably less and less used now. The high S-VHS (close to 50%) ownership level might be explained by a disappointment in VHS quality and a frustration on the fact that LD is a read-only medium. S-VHS was, for its time, an elegant solution to both of these problems: recording capability at LD quality picture. Then come the newly introduced HD players: HD-DVD beating Blu-Ray by a few percent. Had this survey been conducted after Toshiba announced the commercial death of the HD-DVD, we would have probably seen different results. Note that now that HD-DVD is dirt cheap on eBay, I personally indulged myself in a cheap HD- A35 with a lot of about 50 movies (most still sealed) for about $600. Hard to find a better deal! More about HD- DVD later. Remaining sub-10% players are CED (old US/UK capacitance discs), D-VHS (Victor/JVC final round of tape-based contents in digital HD 1080i, both in Japan and USA), W-VHS (Japanese Analog HD on tape) and VHD (Japanese competitor of CED). More information about formats if these acronyms seem unfamiliar to you: S-VHS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-VHS CED http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc http://www.cedmagic.com/selectavision.html D-VHS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-vhs http://www.dvhsmovie.com/ W-VHS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W-VHS VHD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_High_Density http://disclord.tripod.com/ Main reason to keep LD discs/player? 100% 90% 80% 71.10% 70% 60% 50% 44.95% 40% 34.86% 34.40% 33.03% 30% 18.35% 20% 15.14% 15.60% 11.93% 10% 2.29% 0% Movie fan Box sets AC3/DTS Criterion Other Star Wars Covers No DVD Music fan Hi-Vision Chart 2: Why keep my LDs? Without surprise, LD movie fans are more content-driven than format-driven and don’t mind sticking to a commercially obsolete format as long as they see personal value and pleasure in it. The fact that some exotic contents (horror movies, live concerts, jazz, video clips, etc.) still haven’t made it to DVD is a sure indicator that they won’t find their way to future HD mediums any time soon. Most of 70’s and 80’s contents wouldn’t look good in HD anyway by lack of proper source materials. Stick to your LDs for as long as they keep this uniqueness factor! Some contents were also released only Pan&Scan on DVD when the letterboxed version exists on LD. Some others were released but lacked some bonus or commentaries only available on the LD edition. Censorship and politically correct re-releases quite often do not really please fans that prefer to keep the unrated/uncensored version on LD (Disney or Warner cartoons for example). Box sets at the second position are a testament to the “collectability factor” of nice cover art-work, inserts, packages carefully designed (Disney, Criterion, Japanese editions, etc.) that stand the test of time and can still be proudly displayed on a shelf, even in the most recent Home Theater systems. Then of course those deliciously mixed and encoded Dolby Digital AC3 and DTS 5.1 soundtracks have nothing to be ashamed of compared to newly mastered DVD. Originally optimized for full-range speakers, they did not have to cope with smaller sound systems: the digital tracks in surround mode where still available for that purpose. Even today, DTS LDs still command a premium for their soundtrack quality and also for the fact that the complete collection of 100+ titles is within the reach of a collector trying to collect them all. The Criterion Collection enjoys the same kind of collector’s affection (after all, they invented the concept of Special Edition with extra documentaries, commentaries, book, essays, high-end design, etc.). The size of the complete collection (almost 400 discs) also makes it a possible target for collectors avid of completeness. Until Star Wars is finally available in all editions, in a properly HD remastered form with every possible existing bonus and making ofs (the way Blade Runner got treated for its 25 th anniversary release), the US “Faces” as well as the Japanese Boxset editions will still carry a high collectability. And they also look really good on a shelf! Musical contents usually take a longer time to be entirely moved to the next format. Only since quite recently, publishers have been pushing more aggressively Jazz, Classical and Opera contents to DVD. Still, true collectors wouldn’t accept anything released in Dolby Digital 2.0 (instead of LPCM 2.0) when the same program exists on LD in uncompressed digital stereo. Hi-Vision was shortly lived in Japan as an analog HD format based on LD and never conquered the world. Still it preceded current HD formats by more than 10 years and helped to push HD concept in the public’s mind (especially in Japan). I still lovingly keep my MUSE LD player along with the needed decoder and several discs as a tribute to history! I guess I’m not the only one The possible list of choices was not closed and I got several other good possible reasons to keep LDs 8 years after the last disc was manufactured including: • Cheap price on second-hand markets (in lot) • Cover art (can be re-used in a frame to create nice movie art!) • Collecting Anime titles in a more pleasant form • No Digital Right Management (and no Region Code other than PAL vs. NTSC) • Better sound I guess that everyone has a little different reason to keep these shiny discs. I must admit that I couldn’t afford them when I was still a student and took great fun purchasing them later at a fraction of the original cost. Living in Europe at that time, it was also a convenient way to get Hollywood movies soon after their releases (in theaters) and sometimes even before they were even released! Adding more formats to LDDb? I know that stretching a concept too far can be a disastrous strategy. So far LDDb.com has been created for LDs only and later limited support was added for CED, VHD and D-VHS. My focus would be to include the “niche” formats that never reached VHS/DVD mainstream popularity while at the same time managing my own collection. The following question gave a split opinion: Do you think that adding other niche formats to LDDb.com (first VHD and CED, now D-VHS) is a good evolution? 50.68% 49.32% 50.00% 25.00% 0.00% Yes / No Chart 3: Multi-format a good thing? It seems that there is no clear-cut opinion on this… Among the people answering yes to this, extending LDDb one step further to additional formats brought the following votes and it’s still not a clear-cut opinion! 75% 57.7% 55.9% 56.0% 54.6% 52.8% 50% 25% 0% SACD Audio DVD DTS CD Blu-Ray HD-DVD Chart 4: What other format would be a good choice? Since I own discs on all these formats, and because HD-DVD is now an obsolete medium with only a few hundred titles releases, I will try to give them limited support (submit/update only) like CED/VHD/D-VHS have today. This way, if there is a clear request for a specific format, I can still make a separate website based on the same principles that LDDb is using for LDs. In the same way, if a format turns out to be completely useless, I can easily remove it completely. I got a few loud requests to add BETAMAX format as well, but I’m really not sure if that would make any sense at all. Adding VHS or DVD is just too gargantuan a job and wouldn’t make a lot of sense given the size of the audience for LDDb (and my spare time) but keeping on adding Blu-Ray and HD-DVD only for listing purpose might be interesting to know which LD contents is now available in HD. This looks like a more natural way to upgrade from LD in term of quality and contents. If you think otherwise, I’m interested to hear your arguments! Rating LDDb qualities (or lack of…) When asked to rate several aspects of using the website, I grouped “Easy” and “Very Easy” together on the positive side (green), and “Average”, “Confusing” and “Do not understand” on the negative side (red).