The important feature of the laser players is the ability to recover data from damaged disks, which would be unplayable under normal circumstances. I first heard of them in connection with some Swiss wax masters. These were historically important but had heat damage which meant that any attempt to play them conventionally would have destroyed them. I have also seen a demonstration in which a 78, broken completely in half, was lightly glued together and played on a laser deck. While they are interesting to those of us that still have a stack of records, their real virtue is in the potential for recovering rare recordings. OTOH, if they were cheaper, I love the concept of a deck which plays those irreplacable scratched records that skip all over the place.