Behold the Laserdisc player rotating head mechanism (I believe this was a pioneer patent but I don't know for sure)
Honestly I'd rather have two laser pickups, one per side, so that if one fails I can just flip discs and keep using the damn thing, but i'm sure that was expensive.

@wyatt this is so fucking cool. I’m guessing this wasn’t a common feature on laserdisc players, right? this is kind of a special feature on just the fancier ones?

@wyatt I thought first those had two laser pickups. But it seems those must have been very expensive back then.

@LinaBlue the earliest ones were top loading and you had to flip the disc manually. on the "flip side" (haha i'm hilarious) that means a lot fewer mechanical parts to break… but those early ones used helium-neon laser tubes which seem to wear down and die faster than laser diodes do.