Re: Opinions on Laser Disc

["Barbara R. Herbert" <bherb@JUNO.COM>]

Our college's Information Systems Dept. was very big on laser disk
technology; the faculty was not.  Only a literal handful of our faculty
even tried it, and most of those had disks accompanying their textbook.
ISD put together "multimedia teaching stations" (with me buying the AV
equipment) in selected departments that had indicated an interest; I
think 6 stations are in existence.  Other than that, the two disk players
we have for general circulation are collecting dust.

We noticed one problem with the technology.  If the disk is basically a
video in a different format and has both audio and video component, there
generally isn't a problem playing it back.  In our NASA collection,
however, we have a couple of disks that have video only --- they are
basically slides (taken by the astronauts during the various shuttle
missions) on disk.  When we try to play this disk back, the images fly
through too fast for anyone to see them!  I spent three hours one
afternoon (with ISD staff help) trying to slow the images down so people
could really look at each one.  We were successful to a point...we got
the disk slowed to where it kept each image on the screen for about 3
seconds.  In my opinion, that's still not slow enough!

I've decided that until there is more use of the equipment we have, I'm
not buying any more laser disk players.  There's a lot of equipment that
I can buy --- that will be used --- for the price of one laser disk
player.

Just my $.02 worth....

Barbara

Barbara R. Herbert                      home:<bherb@juno.com>
Georgian Court College             work:<herbert@georgian.edu>
Lakewood, NJ  08701-2697