Impact
Laserdisc was poorly received in North America due to the high cost of the players and discs, which were far more expensive than VHS players and tapes, and due to marketplace confusion with the technologically inferior CED, which also went by the name Videodisc. While the format was unsuitable with most North American consumers, it was well received among videophiles and celebrities due to the superior audio and video quality compared to VHS and Betamax tapes, finding a place in nearly one million American homes by the end of 1990. The format was more popular in Japan than in North America because prices were kept low to ensure adoption, resulting in minimal price differences between VHS tapes and the higher quality Laserdiscs, helping ensure that it quickly became the dominant consumer video format in Japan. Anime collectors in every country the LD format was released, which includes both North America and Japan, also quickly became familiar with this format, and sought the higher video and sound quality of laserdisc and the availability of numerous titles not available on VHS. Laserdiscs were also popular alternatives to videocasettes among movie enthusiasts in the more affluent regions of South East Asia, such as Singapore, due to their high integration with the Japanese export market and the disc-based media's superior longevity compared to videocassette, especially in the humid conditions endemic to that area of the world.
The format also became quite popular in Hong Kong during the 1990s before the introduction of VCDs and DVD; although people rarely bought the discs (because each LD was priced around USD100), high rental activity helped the video rental business in the city grow larger than it had ever been previously. Due to integration with the Japanese export market, NTSC laserdiscs were used in the Hong Kong market, in contrast to the PAL standard used for broadcast (This anomaly also exists for DVD). This created a market for multi-system TVs and multi-system VCRs which could display or play both PAL and NTSC materials in addition to SECAM materials (which were never popular in Hong Kong). Some LD players could convert NTSC signals to PAL so that most TVs used in Hong Kong could display the LD materials.
Despite the mild popularity, manufacturers refused to market recordable Laserdisc devices on the consumer market, even though the competing VCR devices could record onto cassette, which hurt sales worldwide. The inconvenient disc size, the high cost of both the players and the media and the inability to record onto the discs combined to take a serious toll on sales, and contributed to the format's poor adoption figures.
Although the Laserdisc format was supplanted by DVD by the late 1990s, many LD titles are still highly coveted by movie enthusiasts (for example, Disney's Song of the South which is unavailable in the US in any format, but was issued in Japan on LD). This is largely because there are many films that are still only available on LD and many other LD releases contain supplemental material not available on subsequent DVD versions of those films. Until the end of 2001, many titles were released on VHS, Laserdisc and DVD in Japan.
LD players are also sometimes still found in contemporary North American high school and college physics classrooms, in order to play a disc of the Physics: Cinema Classics series of mid-20th century Encyclopædia Britannica films reproducing classic experiments in the field which are difficult or impossible to replicate in the laboratories in educational settings. These films have now been released on DVD.
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