A rare LaserDisc prototype has been sold on eBay for an eye-watering sum. The Philips-made product, described as an “HD Mac 12 Glass Plate N.66733 - Laserdisc Prototype - Extra Rare” sold for nearly $1,000. What is most extraordinary is that this is simply a piece of 12-inch optical media, not hardware like a player, a decoder, or any rare movie content for the platform.
The machine-translated Italian listing appears to say that this old optical disc is a very rare sample, designed to test this new HD video technology implemented in the early 1990s. According to the seller, very few such discs are available, as they were never commercially sold. Meanwhile, the condition is described as “various,” but to us, it looks poorly aged and possibly shows signs of laser rot.
Given the above description and some memory of visiting TV and hi-fi stores in the 90s, we reckon that the prototype testing disc may contain a variety of movie clips, trailers, and technical demos. The seller might not be the original owner of this disc or had access to a player, so they can’t truthfully describe its content in a sales listing.
LaserDisc HD history
Introduced in 1993, High Definition LaserDiscs were commonly known as Hi-Vision media at the time. They used a new MUSE (Multiple sUb-nyquist Sampling) encoding format to compress the audio/video stream enough to achieve decent feature lengths onto a single platter.
Japan’s NHK was the first to broadcast HD-quality TV in 1991, with up to 11 hours per day of content available to viewers by 1995. LaserDisc HD (AKA Hi-Vision, or MUSE LD) was a physical format created to hold the same quality of audio-visual content. Sony launched some of the first movie LaserDisc HD discs, including Lawrence of Arabia, Bugsy, and A League of Their Own.
Regarding quality, the LaserDisc HD format more than doubles the resolution of NTSC, moving from 525 to 1125 scan lines, and broadens the screen aspect ratio from 4:3 to the still popular 16:9.
YouTuber Techmoan made two videos about HD LaserDiscs a few years ago. If you want to know more about the format and hear his valued opinion on the quality and value, please click through. From Techmoan’s video, we have put together the approximate optical media-based video format timeline below:
- 1978 - LaserDisc introduced just two years after the first VHS VCR
- 1993 - LaserDisc HD launched (took 14 years to arrive, but died in 1997)
- 1996 – DVD (1998: 1% of households, 2006: 85% of households) A cheaper format, but DVD video quality was ‘good enough’ for most before HD TVs proliferated
- 2006 – HD-DVD and Blu-Ray – first mass-market players / media
- Now – most people download or stream video entertainment
It is thought that LaserDisc HD ultimately failed as it was too expensive for the player and decoder, with the limited market size and cutting-edge components required at the time to play, decode, and watch the discs in HD.
Retro anything = ka-ching?
Nowadays, LaserDisc HD players are few and far between, with eBay samples priced at around $2,500, decoders at about $500, and a few movies that we checked were $350 each. If the market is such that people are willing to pay those prices for the hardware and media, it is probably not surprising that someone will buy a rare LaserDisc HD prototype for $1,000, even if it has laser rot.
Providing some perspective, ancient AV hardware and media isn’t that expensive compared to some of the prices retro computer component sales have achieved in recent years. For example, a year ago, we saw a rare 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 sell for $15,000. In addition, a broken PCB from an Apple-1 computer prototype had a guide price of $500,000 yet sold for $677,196 in 2022.
