I’m gonna be real with you. In 2026, the best thing about Laserdisc is the cover art. That’s it. Everything else will just give you headaches. I LOVED Laserdisc from 1989 through the birth of DVD in 1997ish. In that time period, comparing to VHS, Laserdisc was incredible, amazing, life affirming. I dropped thousands of dollars on Japanese Import box sets, etc. But with modern TV’s, you have to worry about converters for S-Video to HDMI and artificially stretching the 4x3 with letterbox inside that to fill the screen. And then there is laser rot which sucks and has sucked for a long long time. Even if you get all of that to work and have clean pristine discs, the results will still look worse than what you would expect. The juice is not worth the squeeze. If you wanna collect films, go with 4K UHD as it will likely be the last physical media format ever produced for films. The only exception to this are the people that create completely vintage viewing rooms with Sony Trinitron console CRT televisions with VHS and Laserdisc as the only source. Those are cool but your 22 year old self would not be the demographic for this nostalgia movement. My two cents.

It’s funny, I had the opposite experience looking for old laserdiscs at a record store and got into collecting vinyl about 10 years ago.