I had a massive library of laser disks, many of which still haven't come out on dvd, also worked for a few years in a store that sold them. A couple years back I bought a dvd player/recorder and started to burn copies to DVD+R (which I have since converted to high quality DIVX files). The player/recorder had a 90 day guarantee and it died literally on day 91 with about 10 LD's left to convert, which I still have. The only exception is the Director's Cut of Peter Weir's "Dead Poets Society.'' I foolishly parted with that thinking that if it was out on LD that it would surely come out on DVD.

To the poster asking if the picture quality was better, basically a laser disk had more lines of vertical and horizontal resolution being presented than tape did. Some folks even used line doublers to try to make the picture even better. Anyhow, horizontal resolution was over 400 lines LD and just over 200 VHS. Earlier disks are subject to something lovingly called laser rot, the two aluminum disks were glued together and the glue essentially eats its way out from the inside, destroying the data that the laser reads. Only had one disk out of many fall prey to this, a copy of a Julian Temple long form music video for the UK band ABC called ''Mantrap.''

I wouldn't sink a ton of money into laser disk, if you weren't there when it was in it's heyday it's essentially no more than a fetish product like collecting 8 track tapes or super-8 mm digests of movies.