Matt Patoray said:
The best player for those discs is a Pioneer VP-1100 or a Sylvania VP-7200. The Pioneer VP-660 also works well. Avoid the Sony LDP-1000 as almost all of them have laser tubes that have gone to air.
I'm sorry to hear about the Sony; I have a Sony LDP-1500 model I've not run in years. I'll have to check it out. If others bring their laserdisk players to Infoage, maybe I'll bring mine for sale. Matt: an old trick to restore HeNe laser tubes, is to put the tube in a plastic bag and fill the bag with helium. Yes, the helium will leak out of the baggy, but it will hold for a day or so. That seems to be sufficient to restore the helium lost from the gas tube. Comments? Also: I think the topic of laserdisks is marginally "on" for vintage computing. Early commercial video arcade games used laserdisks. I think the first was "Dragon's Lair" if memory serves. Laserdisks were supported by personal computers in the era as used in education - commercial, military, and K-12. (My Sony model has a serial? interface and some kind of command set.) The vintage arcade collectors/restorers are important members of the vintage computing community. Many of the dealers, offer vintage digital parts that cross over to 1970's-80's vintage computers. They are active in the emulation community of course; many also own vintage computers. For myself, early on, I had a summer job repairing those early microprocessor-based video game boards. I also had a contract job, documenting software which supported a set of training videodisks on a PC. Laserdisks (and RCA's SelectaVision Capacitance Electronic Disc or CED) were an important development in multimedia computing for industry and home. Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net