I never knew there were three types of cylinders. Learned something new.
I've got a Sony CD player made back in '89 that plays homemade discs just fine, so I've always found it weird about how some have problems with the latest players. But it's amazing how we can burn them to begin with.
I'd have loved to had that laser player several years back. I too have gotten rid of my collection, such as it was, nothing the Smithsonian will miss.
I seem to have read once that Baird made some attempts to record his TV signals on discs back then. Maybe this program mentioned in the article could reveal another piece of history.
I think that one type is made of wax (very fragile) while the other is bakelite (blue plastic).
Even "records" are made of different materials and different things are used to clean them (what is good for one isn't for another, eg. water is bad for another while alcohol is bad for a different type).
There will always be some laserdisc that just cannot be had on DVD or some later format. There are commentary tracks that will forever be "out of print" (like on the first edition Criterion James Bond discs); the studio was not happy about some of the comments. There are prints like the original theatrical release of Blade Runner (or even the Star Wars trilogy).
Then there are small edition titles like one I have of Space Shuttle missions from the early 1980s. It has day launches, night launches, night landings, different mission tasks, 16mm film of the cockpit activity during a launch. I found that for $7 at a used bookstore near Johnson Space Center in "Houston". It was a marketed item but not by NASA or even any sizeable company. It doesn't have all of the studio music or naration that overproduced documentaries do.
The question is how much will it cost to reconstruct some of this information in a laboratory setting?
The Zapruder film of the JFK assassination has been optically scanned. Since the film was shot 8mm film, there is no negative. The film had additional image data around the sprocket holes that no one would ever "see". There is a video release of that footage with the additional data shown (and in several ways).
Also, when it comes to "preserving" data, the historical measure has been for recorded tape. It is the standard for archivists. Digital recordings are not analog. Also they could have dropout within a matter of years (how good are the copies?).
The costly solution (which I have not heard discussed) is optical soundtrack on filmstock. They were actually recording some albums this way in the 1960s.
Too much of the culture has been deemed "disposable", with it history is being discarded.