CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[Syncopated1]

I read the description of how the rarity grades were added to the title database. Genius and a whole lot of work! That was twenty years ago though and relied on creative sampling of information available at the time.

Has it been tweaked since then?

Frequency of appearance on eBay would seem to be the best way to make these determinations now. I'm not talking about value, just frequency of appearance, value and rarity are not even all that well correlated with CEDs.

It is nice to have a standard reference, I'm just wondering how well that standard reference holds up.
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Working: SGT-100 x2, SGT-200, SGT-250, SJT-90 x2, SJT 100, SFT-100,
Need Work: SKT-400, SJT-400, SJT-90, SGT-100 x2

[SelectaVision420]

i dont believe it has been changed since its inception. to update it would be a lofty task. i think you would have to start from scratch today as if you were buying the whole title base from scratch, and use that info to input. also that list will probably be irrelevant in 5 or 10 years with the way things are going. lots of people selling bad discs and discs getting broken in the mail is reducing their numbers, as well as lately hoards have been popping up for sale.
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(2)Sears 274 & 934(80150,10&11350), sft100, sgt250, sjt 090-400, vp550, VDR3000, VP2000 & 4000
complete '84 Dimensia Owner

[lynx]

[Syncopated1]

I can venture a guess on the UK titles.

The US title rarity grades were devised from listings of items for sale from various US sources available to the compiler. Theoretically similar for sale data could have been collected in the UK but he would have had significantly less interaction with people there and the various venues where they were for sale, often offline at the time.

Plus the smaller number of items produced would have made the sampling even harder to guess and the results less meaningful.

The rarity classifications do seem to match up with frequency of appearance on eBay in most cases, which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

I do wonder about some of the later discs produced like Rocky IV. I have an unopened copy and it occurs to me that means it wasn't sold. When hoards appear now, 35 years later, they may be especially likely to contain New Old Stock of those later titles.

I would predict a lot of estate lots appearing in the next few years as independent retailers and video store owners who got stock with them in the 80s pass away. Craigslist reliably seems to have discs available by the hundreds somewhere.

But rarity and value are only correlated on the ends of the spectrum. If Star Wars or Apocalypse Now were rare they would be very valuable but because the are the sort of thing every CED owner needed, and no one would ever throw out, they are common.

Service discs are exactly the kind of thing people would throw out, or not think to sell on eBay, they already would have been relatively rare and just about anyone collecting discs now would want them. So rarity and value correlate.

But a boring made for TV drama or a knock off cartoon from the 80s isn't going to be valuable no matter how rare it is.

eBay makes establishing value easy. The benefit to knowing rarity is in deciding whether you can pass something up now and reliably find it whenever you want it.
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Working: SGT-100 x2, SGT-200, SGT-250, SJT-90 x2, SJT 100, SFT-100,
Need Work: SKT-400, SJT-400, SJT-90, SGT-100 x2