The RCA Selectavision Videodisc system (CED)*

From the WIRED article:

I had never heard of it, and 1981 (I was 12) was the year I became interested in audio/video equipment and started to read (european) magazines. But I knew about ElcaSet.

 

Buying music in order to just listen to it is freaky indeed. Only the collector really appreciates music

 

We got one, a Zenith brand. It was either late '81 or early '82. My parents weren't early technology adopters so it's funny to think of my dad bringing this magic movie box home and hooking it up to our RCA 21" TV!

I remember gathering with my sister and folks around the TV (I was 11 or 12 at the time) and watching mostly WB and MGM classics on the thing. My dad went gaga over 'Yankee Doodle Dandy', and we all must have watched 'Singin' In The Rain' a dozen times!

I think we must have owned copies of those to and a few more, otherwise they rented discs.

The novelty wore off quickly though. New skips appeared on every play no matter how careful we were. It wasn't too long before dad got our first video machine...Beta of course. By '84 we were a VHS family.

dan c

 

March 22, 1981 - RCA debuts SelectaVision videodisc


...and the world did a collective "Yawn!!"

 

BTW, didn't that name sound totally dated? More like the 60's.

 

...same marketing department that came up with 'Dynagroove' and 'Dynaflex' ya think???

dan c

 

Hey, it could have been "new iPad"...

 

There was even an earlier SelectaVision, used for an aborted 3/4" cassette system that never came out. And they also had a holographic tape system that never went anywhere. RCA had tons of weird research projects going on in the back room throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

 

This site has more info than anyone would ever need to know about the format:

http://www.cedmagic.com/

He has a title database for UK released titles so it at least came out there.

I had a player growing up and at one point had the original Star Wars trilogy on the format. Outside of the movies being pan/scan, Star Wars and Empire were both time compressed to fit on their respective discs and sound sped up in some parts.

It was fun from a nostalgic perspective, but it was worthless as a serious home theater piece.

 

At least the machines were still made in the USA.

Can't say that about most anything these days...

 

Yeah, that would be the original 1982 transfer done by Lou Levinson at Modern Videofilm in Hollywood. RCA did their own time-compression because of the 59-minute something-seconds time limitation of the disc sides.

Laserdisc had the same limitation, but Fox was smart enough to just go to three sides for it (two discs). My memory is that Star Wars was like 2:05 or something, so it definitely wouldn't fit on a 2-hour format.

BTW, the original SelectaVision CED format they tested in the late 1970s had no caddy. The slightly-oily disc surface picked up so much dirt and contaminants, they gave up and had to put them in a plastic container to protect it.

The players still suffered from being very sensitive to dust and dirt in the air, which inevitably got inbetween the capacitive pickup (which skated over the grooves at an extremely light tracking force, under 1/10th of a gram) and the disc surface. One of their last-generation 400-series players would automatically detect when the stylus was getting clogged, and it would quickly lift it up, a little arm would come out and brush the crap off, then it would go right back where it left off. It was the most Rube Goldberg-esq thing you ever saw, like something out of a Warner Bros. cartoon, but the RCA engineers were very proud of it.

When they demoed this to us, we were kind of stunned and said, "gee, that's very nice." The whole thing was sad. This was at the Indianapolis Rockville Road plant, which was the head office for the entire CED operation. I never understood how bizarre cooperate stupidity could be until I observed RCA's senior-level marketing people and scientists directly. A few of them would confide in us and say, "yeah, we know it's a piece of crap, but hey, it's a miracle it works as well as it does." That was pretty much the truth.

At one point, I think RCA was losing about $35 per player (at least the cheap ones), and they were hoping to make it up on the disc sales. Needless to say, that razor-and-blades approach didn't work.

 

Thanks for the (many) insider comments. I could totally hear "Powerhouse" via Stalling in my head while picturing that brush coming out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9-7uLg-DZU

 

Back in '93 I mentioned in passing to a guy I was working with my folks had a player and he got really excited. "Do you have An American Werewolf In London"? I ended up making a VHS copy for him and he was eternally grateful. During the movie theater scene, all other VHS / laserdisc prints were really dark and obscured Griffin Dunne and the group of dead talking to him. But when the CED was transferred the black levels were dialed up, revealing everything behind him.

They are great conversation pieces, though. Like an album cover, it's a great way to display artwork. When I got that copy of American Werewolf signed by John Landis recently, I saw his inner geek come out as he'd never seen one before and was fascinated. So yes, besides my modest collection being the heavy anchor to keep my record shelf from collapsing, they've managed to be strangely relevant in my life. Haven't pulled out the player in 13 years, though.

Mark

 

In 1984 I purchased several of RCA's top of the line "Dimensia" series components. This system unfied all the RCA audio & video components together with a single cable that daisy chained each component to the next. A very large remote control requiring both hands to operate came with the 25" color tv w/BTSC stereo, RCA's first to offer broadcast stereo. A "Dimensia" series CED player was promoted in the catalog but never was produced. I opted for the top of the line CED player that was available. While many retailers sold the machines and discs, RCA also had several stand alone CED stores that sold only RCA brand CED players and discs. I still have the RCA CED test disc for old times sake. The U.S. manufactured components were produced at RCA factories in Indiana and were well made with metal cases and could be ordered with custom matching cabinets for all the gear. However, RCA dropped the "Dimensia" name after 1986. The public associated the term with the mental condition that comes with ageing.
Another RCA faux-pas in naming a product line.

-Steve D.

 

My uncle owned one of these. As a kid I thought it was cool but one thing that bugged me even back then was that the covers would get ruined sliding them in and out of the unit. Every cover looked beat to death sitting next to the TV.

 

Why did RCA think this product could compete with Laserdiscs (which had already been on the market for 3 years)??

 

CED was a far cheaper option. No doubt the brains at RCA believed they'd make home video affordable to all.

On paper it makes sense in some weird way. In reality of course....not so much.

dan c

 

Laserdiscs never really caught on with the public in the way VHS did, either though. They were too expensive, you (mostly) had to flip them over in the middle of the movie, etc.

 

I swear to god, we had to stifle our laughter when we saw that little brush come out and go "tick-tock tick-tock." When we were out of earshot of the RCA engineers, I turned to my writing partner and went "bump-bump-bump BUM bum-bum-bum-bum," the whole "Power House" theme. (I don't think RCA would've gotten the joke.)

Actually, it was videotape that killed them. RCA had developed CED at a time when there were no home VCRs (early 1970s), but just couldn't get them to work until it was too late. Peter Goldmark, credited as being the inventor of the LP vinyl disc, created a home video system that recorded video images on film ("Electronic Video Recording"), but CBS pulled the plug on that the moment 3/4" videocassettes came out. They correctly realized that tape would be soon be a mass-market success.

There's a very similar story with Polaroid's "Polavision" instant movie film system, which Dr. Land worked on for decades. By the time it came out in 1977, nobody cared -- Betamax and VHS were already on the market, and Polavision looked very clunky, dim, and expensive by comparison, plus it couldn't do sound and the film cassettes only lasted 2-1/2 minutes. They lost millions on this, but not quite as bad as RCA's CED losses.

One insider told me that laserdiscs cost roughly $6 each to manufacture, and even more in small quantities. That plus the difficulty of getting high yields out of the manufacturing plants was an almost-insurmountable battle.

By comparison, in 1997 pre-recorded VHS tapes cost about $3 apiece (shrink-wrapped, in a color sleeve), and DVDs eventually cost a buck apiece. Laserdisc was a prestige product for its time, but it was never better than a break-even format at best.

 

Is it possible RCA had been working on their own laserdisc system sometime in the mid-70's?

In November '75, RCA was the sponsor of Space Mountain (at Disneyworld), and upon exiting the ride, you took a conveyor belt past animated mannequins living in the "house of the future".

Anyway, IIRC, a couple of the characters were "watching" these big, shiny, silver discs that gave off a rainbow effect in the bright light. Discs that looked just like laserdiscs, not the shiny black discs found inside the CED slipcases.

I remember the shiny discs better than anything else in the house of tomorrow because they just looked so amazing - movies on a rainbow-like platter in the convenience of your own home.

As for why RCA must have felt CED could compete, well, laserdiscs were a mess the first few years. CAV was the only option (a mere 30 minutes per side), and DiscoVision discs were notorious for self-destructing in short order.

Once CLV LDs pushed the play time to 60 minutes a side, and better quality control started happening, CED discs probably didn't seem so bad.

(The story of DiscoVision can be read on this informative site: http://www.blamld.com/DiscoVision/index.htm).

 

That's rich.

 

Oops... Need to make this correction to my last post:

 

No, but I also remember that Space Mountain exhibit. RCA had dozens, maybe hundreds, of concepts that never got out of the R&D lab. I think that was just an artist's rendition turned into an audio-animatronic scene, like videophones and all that other stuff that didn't exactly happen the way they predicted. (Read the book Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived.)

No, CED always looked worse when you directly compared them to Laserdisc. Heck, I don't think CED looked much better than VHS, to tell you the truth. All of them were grungy, composite analog formats with color-under processing, all with terrible compromises in noise, sharpness, and detail. All suffered from dropouts, artifacts, and manufacturing issues (especially laserdiscs).

I've always said: the three things that killed laserdiscs were not that obvious: the convenience of DVD (entire movie on one side), the low-cost of DVD manufacturing, and the relatively-high defect rate of laserdiscs. I think the large size of laserdiscs also was a factor; people got seduced by the small size of DVD, and concluded it was a higher-tech format -- which it was, in most ways.

In many ways, the collapse of CED in 1984 was the beginning of the end of the American consumer electronics business. They tried to get it back by creating the HDTV standard in the 1990s, tossing away the original Japanese HD system, but it didn't suddenly allow Zenith and RCA to spring back to life.

 

I got to see RCA's Home of Future Living back in Walt Disney World in the Seventies. This photo is from futureprobe:

View attachment 218105

Is that the old yellow RCA label?

 

Here's some home movies of Space Mountain from 1978 and 1981

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLawfx3DlDI