News
Pioneer Stops Making Laserdisc Players After 27 Years
posted on by Egan Loo
The electronics company Pioneer has announced on Wednesday that it is ending production of its laserdisc players after 27 years. Laserdiscs were the spiritual 30-centimeter (12-inch) wide ancestors to today's CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray Discs. The assembly lines will shut down after the final 3,000 players in four models (the DVD-compatible DVL-919, the CD-compatible CLD-R5, and the karaoke-capable DVK-900 and DVL-K88).
Pioneer and laserdiscs have a long intertwined history with anime. In an effort to create titles for the format, Pioneer financed the establishment of the Universal Pictures International Entertainmnent.
At the time, laserdiscs offered anime titles two main advantages that the competing VHS videotape format did not offer: soundtracks in multiple languages and higher resolution. Until the advent of DVDs in the late 1990s, many distributors on Japan and North America shipped anime on both laserdisc and VHS formats. Pioneer sold 3.6 million laserdisc players in Japan alone.
Source: ITmedia
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