Jaws CAV Discovision

A laserdisc I've been after for quite some time has finally come up on eBay. The problem is that I've never seen it come up for auction in the UK, the seller is in the USA and doesn't want to post outside of the USA.

Would any USA members be able to help out and bid on my behalf?

If anyone is willing to help me out then please send me a private message. I would of course be willing to pay the full bid amount, postage and packaging and also the second postage fee to send it to the UK.

I have bought many times from Jason (admin) and I'm sure he will agree that I am a safe buyer if you need a reference.

If anyone can help out I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks : )

Unfortunately I'm of no help but out of pure intrest only, what Laserdisc are you after?

Ok, managed to eventually talk the seller into letting me bid. One of the advantages of living in the UK is that the conversion rate for the dollar is so good that you can "splash out" a bit on US items.

This thread can be removed now...or just left to drift to the bottom of the forum, either way I hope it's not been too intrusive.

bullruckle wrote:

Out of pure intrest only, what Laserdisc are you after?

I'll let you know once the item has ended tonight. Not many people seem to have noticed it yet so I'm hoping not to draw too much attention to it. I don't think it's uber rare as I know a few people on the forum have it, it's just hard to get in the UK. I hope I'm not being too evil/selfish by keeping it a secret.

I've got the UK PAL Indiana Jones boxset coming in the post, I'll be posting in the Latest Arrivals thread when I get that so will let you know if I won this auction and what it was in there.

Hi Ewan
Think I know what it might be that you are wanting to bid on but if it is not then I have seen a few items for sale that I think you will like.
PM sent

Huzzah! I won the bid and I am now the proud owner of...
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Hopefully it will arrive soon.

Admin, and probably a few other people, guessed correctly.

Looking forward to seeing what the "first laserdisc" is like.

Well done , I know you have been after it for a while so its great to see that you have finally managed to find one and in what looks to be very good condition.

Cheers. The box looks to be in fantastic condition, but from what I've read of DiscoVision titles the quality of the disc can be VERY hit or miss. Fingers crossed it'll be watchable. I will of course update when it arrives and let you know what the quality is like.

Ah, nice to see that you got your hands on a copy at last. Now I'm not the only owner of that edition here on Dinodisc.
For the time it was released, it's actually a very impressive edition. The colors are a bit warm but the picture has good detail and the brightness is way better than you're used to when it comes to old LD's (old editions are usually so bright that it gets annoying). How much did you pay for it? I got mine for $5, though the shipping wasn't cheap (around $23 or so) but all in all, it was less than $30 and I think that's a fairly good price when you whink about how uniqe it is.

I wasn't quite as lucky as you, I got mine for $42 (roughly £27), but I don't mind since like you say it's pretty saught after and it looks to be in great condition. How well do your discs play? I've heard that the colours on the original CAV pressing are far superior to the CLV re-issue.

Mine has a light laser rot, Dadc-pressings are usually much worse though. The rot isn't something too serious and the picture still looks pretty good.
About the transfer itself, as the film was shot in Panavision about 46% of the original picture is lost since the pictue isn't letterboxed. For the satisfaction of the film, it suvives the cropping but if you just want to watch the actual film for what it is I would say that any of the Signature Collection-editions would be the way to go. The audio is good enough, some of the more intense scenes seems to have a bit high frequency (could it be a part of the laser rot?) but overall I think the track does a fairly good job.

Also, take a closer look at the discs. I'm not sure if this is just my copy or if it's common, but on the third side (second disc, of course), the title says "Jaws 2" but the number is somewhat crossed, while the other side of the disc just says "Jaws". Though all the actual video-content is from Jaws and Jaws 2 was released the same year as this edition. The last side is completely unplayable, your player will just throw out the disc immediatley so I wouldn't recommend you to try that out.

nissling wrote:

I'm not sure if this is just my copy or if it's common, but on the third side (second disc, of course), the title says "Jaws 2" but the number is somewhat crossed, while the other side of the disc just says "Jaws".

I'll let you know if mine is the same when it arrives.

nissling wrote:

The last side is completely unplayable, your player will just throw out the disc immediatley so I wouldn't recommend you to try that out.

I've heard that these sides, called dead sides, can sometimes be playable. To reduce wastage DiscoVision would use defect sides of other titles, put a thin layer of coating over them and stuck used them to make up odd sides. Sometimes the coating has warn off with age, sometimes people have removed them and depending on the reason why that side was initially rejected it can be played. Apparently some titles that never officially made it onto Discovision have turned up, as well as CAV versions of sides only released in CLV.

As I said in the Latest Arrivals thread, Jaws arrived today!

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The box, sleeves and discs are all in great condition for their age, I've seen copies of this laserdisc with the cover and labels peeling off, glad to say this isn't the case with this one.

I've not had the chance to watch it all the way through yet but have checked the beginning and end of each side as they tend to be the most common places for bad rot. The ends of sides 1 and 2 seem to be the worst effected as the film starts to skip and loop. I've not come across this on a laserdisc before, it's almost like a vinyl LP skipping or the kind of problems I've seen in CEDs.

Even though side 1 has rot it is literally not until the last few seconds of the side so It's not a big deal. Side 2 is more heavily effected and seems to start when they discover the wrecked boat until the end of the side...which I think is around when the head floats past the hole in the boat. I'll have to wait and see how much this effects play when I sit down and watch it in one go.

Other than that there's a bit of speckling but not too much and the picture is a lot sharper and more vibrant than I was expecting. I've scene DVDs with worse picture quality.

I've managed to capture a few pictures via my laptop. As with other pictures I've captured from Laserdisc please bear in mind that viewing LDs on a computer greatly reduces their quality. Because most LDs are interlaced when displayed on a computer screen they either appear jagged or miss out ever second line thus reducing the quality by half. I think in this case the latter has happened as these screenshots look much worse than when I played it through the TV.

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Certainly this is much higher quality than I expected from the first laserdisc. Does anyone know how Jaws earned this title? I know that it was present at the December 15th 1978 Discovision launch and that it is listed 001 in the Action category, but there were around 50 other titles available that day. Was Jaws the first one manufactured?

I found the packaging really interesting, and actually quite luxurious when compared to latter day LDs. Each disc comes in a felt sleeve. What I found really interesting about it though is that obviously all the Discovision boxes are obviously the same and the film image on the front is actually a sticker which spans around to the back of the box which provides the blurb and forms a hinge for the two halves of the box. Having seen many pictures of Discovision releases I never imagined that is how they would be constructed.

Nissling, my copy has the correct label for side three simply reading Jaws. From what I've heard of production practices of Discovision I wouldn't be surprised if they simply stuck the wrong one on then scored out the two.

Anyway, I'll stop wittering. I'm really pleased with this laserdisc, I wasn't expecting it to play so well and it really is in great condition.

EDIT: I forgot to say that i did have one unusual problem with this LD. My player couldn't find the start of the first side of each disc except for the first, I had to skip to around frame 500 and could then rewind back to the beginning. The first side on each disc contains an intro bumper that doesn't contain frame numbers, perhaps this has something to do with it though that wouldn't explain why side one works fine. Still, it's not a big deal but I thought it was interesting, has anyone else had a similar problem with Discovision LDs?

HippieDalek wrote:

As I said in the Latest Arrivals thread, Jaws arrived today!

<snip.

I've scene DVDs with worse picture quality.

<snip>

Good pun, intentional?

Great review there. The caps do show some of the minor speckles that you described but on the whole, it looks to be a good picture. I like that cover, it's like it demonstrates, part-and-parcel, the excitement of owning a high quality copy of a film...the excitement of that whole 'home video' age.

PeaceMaker1 wrote:

Good pun, intentional?

Ooops, no a genuine spelling mistake.

I agree, that there's just something grand and exciting about the Discovision covers. I think the Muse Hi-Vision discs also do a good job of conveying that too, from what I've seen it looks like they come in giant CD cases!

Indeed, and because of the sheer size of the format, it has much more of a 'movie poster' feel to it too.

I think that's certainly a large part of the reason people still buy Laserdiscs and LPs. A tiny 5 inch CD case just doesn't do the artwork justice.