Pioneer announced this week that it was halting the production of its line of Laserdisc players. If you are shocked that the electronics giant was still making Laserdisc players, you are not alone. CDs evolved out of the technology used to create Laserdiscs, but the latter never achieved more than a two percent market share in the United States.

If you are a child of the '80s, you may recall Laserdiscs as a format that sprang up to battle VHS. From what I recall, the discs were large and about the size of a LP album and required you to get up mid-movie and flip the disc (or change discs altogether). Towards the end of the format's life there were players that could read both sides of a disc, but only one player was ever built that could both hold two discs and read two sides.



Actual comparison of Laserdisc vs. DVD. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Pioneer says that it kept selling the players due to the vast libraries of Laserdisc movies that Japanese customers had built up. Obviously, the format was much more popular in the land of the rising sun than it was here in America.

Pioneer says its latest Laserdisc player models DVL-919, CLD-R5, DVK-900, and DVL-K88 are all being closed out. Pioneer says that the popularity of Blu-ray and DVD players has caused difficulty getting the parts needed to continue production of players for the defunct standard.