The bolded sure didn't stop vinyl, As a matter of fact They are still made today right?
And as to the market being limited to Videophiles, that was a direct result of the rest being priced out. Tell me how many VHS collectors there were and if they were priced competitively which do you think the majority would prefer? And of course better tech was found and adopted, THAT happens to every Tech there is. And yes once again Sony cost themselves with copywrite just like the Betamax. But as a simple recorded media storage device Laserdisc was leaps and bounds beyond any magnet tape consumer system, that just cannot be argued.
Oh yeah and yes it is a nice rally, just got a little more yesterday at 0.01236290
Vinyl is a niche / hipster resurgence. The recent resurgence doesn't even begin to compare with the growth of VHS / CD / DVD in their prime. All three were among the fastest / largest consumer appliance adoptions in history. And vinyl players are much simpler / smaller than laserdisc players. And urning over a vinyl while smoking pot and drinking craft beer is less disruptive than having to do that while watching Jaws.
Pricing doesn't happen in a vacuum. If more people perceived Laserdisc as superior to VHS, there would have been more first adopters, and then second adopters, and then the Laserdisc manufacturers would have more economies of scale and capital to invest in R&D to develop cheaper players. Original video cassette players were also very expensive, but as people started to see the paradigm shift / mass consumer appeal, more competitors entered the market, more capital invested in factories, economies of scale, etc.
Quality in terms of mass consumer adoption is a subjective matter. While Laserdisc may have had better image / sound quality, it turns out the qualities that were more compelling were: multi-function (time-shifting TV, ability to play recorded home videos with also originally expensive VHS cameras); lower cost of production (niche videos and PORN!); and relative durability. Cost followed these attributes.
When music companies were getting killed by the ipod and other digital offerings, they also tried the "quality" argument. They tried to point out that CDs were better quality than most digital offerings, and there was a brief attempt at "HD Audio." But it turned out, the quality that mattered this time was cheapness and ubiquitous access. The FLAC guys remained a niche.
PS - Re. the Sony patent I cited, that one didn't hurt them. Together with Philips and other players, they created a patent licensing consortium where they bundled all the patents that were "essential" for CD production into a single offering that was available to any party who wanted to make CDs for a fixed cost, part of the "red book" standard. So there is also a legal / cooperative aspect to why CDs and then DVDs became the global standard.
PPS - Seriously, don't dismiss the impact of porn. The high capital costs to manufacture laserdiscs meant manufacturing was centralized among large companies. Those companies didn't want to make dirty filthy porn movies. But the ease of duplicating VHS cassettes meant smaller companies could easily enter the VHS porn market. Porn is to media as drugs / illegal activities are to crypto. Aha - I managed to turn the conversation back to Monero!