My Hobbies

Home Theater

DVDs/LDs

Of course, what's a Home Theater worth if you have nothing to play on it! There certainly isn't much, if anything, available on broadcast TV. So my medium of choice was first Laser Disc and now DVD.

So, what's so good about DVD? Well, if you really like movies, you won't want to view a movie in any other medium. Everything is better, the picture quality, the audio quality, the ability to see the movie presented in the way that the director created it.

Technical Specs

I don't really know all of the technical specifications, but what I do know is what I can see and hear and for me DVD (and before that LD) is the answer.

I currently own hundreds of movies on DVD and LD. If you check my complete listing, you'll see that I've purchased a number of them twice. First on LD then on DVD. Why would I do that, you ask? Because they keep improving the quality.

Although, by now I've discovered Ebay and have gotten rid of most of the duplicates. And my collection is now radically skewed towards DVDs and not LDs.

The Star Wars Saga

But take Star Wars, for example. I own every single version of Star Wars ever released. From the VHS tapes all the way to the Laser Disc Box Set of the Special Edition. But for movies that you like, and that you watch over and over and over, it makes sense.

Just for collector's purposes, I think I will keep all the versions that I have of Star Wars. One of my former hobbies was a Star Wars collector, but I've given up acquiring anything new. Especially with the onset of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, there is just too much crap out there. It's not like 1977, anymore, when people bought the stuff to play with. And if you somehow managed not to throw it out, it's now worth a lot. But that's another story. Maybe I'll add a page on that, someday.

DVD Rental Market

The other good thing about DVD is the active rental market. I made a lot of LD purchasing mistakes in the early days, as back then, there wasn't any LD Rental market. But now, there's many DVD rental options.

My current favorite rental place is NetFlix.com. Nope, they aren't paying me anything to plug them, I just think they're great. You order up the DVDs you want online, they mail them to you, you get to keep them for as long as you like, and then you mail them back, in the pre-paid mailer that they provide. For $21.95 a month you can rent unlimited DVDs. With one catch that you can only have 3 checked out at a time, so there is a limitation. But it's great!