20 LaserDiscs That Are Still Extremely Valuable
After the invention of VHS, but before DVD took over as the dominant home-video format, there was LaserDisc. Although it never gained a huge share of the market, thousands of LaserDiscs were sold and collected over a period of two decades. At one point, they were widely considered “the future of home entertainment.” Just look at that image above! Would an image you saw on the internet lie? Never.
Compared to VHS, LaserDiscs were expensive and sometimes temperamental; their surfaces didn’t stand up as well to dust or scratches. That’s a big reason LaserDiscs got dodo’d so quickly by DVDs; they were undeniably a superior technology. Despite their size, LaserDiscs also held less information than DVDs, which meant they had to be flipped over during a feature, and longer films needed to be stretched out across multiple discs.
Still, during a period where a vast majority of mainstream moviegoers thought letterboxed films meant their TV was broken, LaserDisc was the format of choice for cinephiles who wanted the best possible audio and video quality in their home theater. Even as the format faded into obscurity, those who love LaserDisc continued paying hefty prices to expand their collections. Following my recent tours of eBay to consider the prices of other “dead” physical media, I took a look around the market for LaserDiscs — and found that in some cases people are willing to spend as much or more to get their hands on rare discs. Like, for example these 20 items that all recently sold on eBay...
Gallery — VHS Tapes That Are Also Still Extremely Valuable: