The RCA Selectavision Videodisc system (CED)*

I bought a player and several discs after these came out in 1981,I thought it was great at the time! Does anybody still have working players and disc collections?

 

Yes, I do ! It still works fine, although it rarely gets used now. I enjoy those big film discs !

 

I like the look of the package, but let's face it, this was the 8-track of its kind....prone to skips, video noise and artifacts, and just as bad, this was still a time when letterboxing was unheard of, so you've got tons of pan and scanned films, not to mention some with time compression added. Gadzooks! Horrors!

The movies themselves make nice display pieces for the artwork alone....

 

I like laser discs! But thats something different than this.

 

It was REALLY cool from an engineering standpoint. I mean, it's basically the same technology that Edison used but taken to such a wild level.

But Ed's right on. 8-track video basically. It was a pain! We had one when I was a kid. There was no way not to scratch those things.
Worst of all, while some of our upwardly mobile neighbors were recording TV shows with their sexy new VCRs, the humble VideoDisc owners were left feeling like complete nerds.

It was a sad end to the RCA corporation. Sad, they put all of their eggs in that ill-fated basket.

dan c

 

You guys know about CED Magic, right? One of my early favorite sites on the Web.

http://www.cedmagic.com/

 

I nosed around the site just now. So was this "vinyl video"? Sounds like it would have been cool if they worked out all the problems Ed posted about!

 

Essentially, 'vinyl video' is not entirely wrong, but the 'stylus' was optical in nature, I believe...but really, it was a bad idea, not least because the laserdisc was also going to be available, and while both formats started out badly, the LD eventually drew Criterion's interest, the standards were raised(though not all the software kinks were ever totally removed from the equation), and the CED format, already riddled with problems, never really had a chance. And the price per title was not inexpensive, typical of that time before the(relatively)low tags we enjoy now.

I have a friend who has hundreds of these discs--many sealed--but I told him it would be doubtful he'd get much for them unless a CED enthusiast got wind of his stash and wanted to take them off his hands. Even then, most collectors won't pay premiums for stuff like this.

 

I just watched a video on the above site on the making of a disc - and it used terms we throw around here - master, mother, stamper etc. It was hokey, but a neat little novelty.

 

It actually was a stylus riding in grooves...only, it was a carbon-filled disc with an electrode on the stylus tip that read the peaks and valleys of the disc; the resulting voltage differences were what created the video. Clever if you think about it!

 

Even more clever if it had worked over time.......which it didn't. Didn't take much to go wrong to make them skip, or have 'rot' issues(video noise, which looked a lot like the laser rot of the future)....

 

RCA actually had solved most of the problems but it was too late. By the summer of 1984 players were selling here for $25.

 

Ahhhh, memories....

Wired.com article on the debut of the RCA Selectavision videodisc

 

Cool. I love that ad. The disc is practically as big as the kid.

 

No more console TV anymore either.

 

I was just watching Star Wars on CED the other day.

 

My joke back in the 1980s was, "what does RCA's CED stand for? Certified Electronic Dud."

RCA wound up losing $580 million on this, and it was the beginning of the end of the company. The real problem with CED is that it was designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and they couldn't figure out a way to make it work for another decade. If they could've come out with it years before Betamax, it might have worked.

A terrible, terrible, terrible format. I never once saw an RCA CED disc that didn't skip. One RCA spokesman clarified: "oh, our disc players don't skip, in that you'll never see the same thing twice, like you would with a stuck LP. Our players will always jump forward, so you'll never experience that problem."

The RCA execs were in a total state of denial about how bad the product was, and what a mistake it had been to market it 10 years late...

 

The RCA videodisc system was the first home video format I owned. VCR's were still pretty pricey at this time, so I bought the basic RCA player at Video Concepts for $229.00. There were several places to rent the discs and I also bought several. They were cheap compared to VHS tapes which could cost nearly a hundred dollars each in some cases.

 

"In its first three years, RCA only managed to sell about 550,000 consoles, and on April 4, 1984, it pulled the plug. The system was never released in Europe. The company lost about $580 million on the project, and the losses crippled the company so much that General Electric later took it over in the U.S."

Ouch...I remember these videoboxes from my teenage years. A buddy of mine had a dad who used to rent one & it was a POS. We would rent concerts and movies and they all skipped & didn't work properly. However, I did find a cool relic of the early-video age a while ago...

 

I know where to get a ton of these discs cheap, I saw them in a thrift store just today. PLEASE pm me if you want them, I will pick them up before they disappear.

 

I've got "Rust Never Sleeps" and a Who live disc as well on this format.

 

No real reason to watch CEDs, seeing as I don't believe there are any exclusive titles (unlike Laserdisc), but it's still really interesting.

 

What was it like?

I've always wondered if this could be done.



Also, has anyone ever made a Cassette tape video player. By that i mean, record video and audio on a standard cassette tape (the little ones for music) and be able to play it back like a video?

 

Fisher-Price Pixel Vision video camera.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000