CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[dcayea]

Has anyone connected their CED player to a widescreen television? This Christmas season I will be upgrading the home theater to big screen and a PS/3 and I'd like to keep the CED player in the mix, but only if I know how it looks.

[eno]

I recently watched Tron on my sjt-400 played through an up-converter on a new top of the line sony widescreen lcd. It looked alright. The letters on the "please load disc" message appeared slightly more round. The movie looked pretty good. Next time I will try a more traditional film.

[Rixrex]

I also have played CEDs on my widescreen HD TV, a nice pioneer model. While the CED looked fine, of course all of the lesser resolution was more visible. I would say that the CED was comparable to a Beta tape or an older VHS tape. (At the risk of offending Beta collectors, which I am one, I find newer VHS tapes, post 1990, better quality than Beta.)

Anyway, I found the CED to work very well when channelled through my DVDO HD video enhancer, rather than straight to the set. The enhancer improves upon many of the characteristic 'flaws' of watching lower resolution on HD TVs. In fact, I'd recommend such a device for anyone moving to an HD TV set, but who still has extensive CED, LD and/or tape collections. The LDs actually look as good as DVDs.

[toasterking]

I know this is a little off-subject since this is not a hi-def component, but I have my SKT-400 connected to an old Proxima DP2800 LCD projector made in 1993. This is certainly not in the same class as modern hi-def components as it uses VGA (640x480) resolution and the digitizer has lower performance characteristics than modern components. The composite video out on the CED player is connected to the composite video in on the DP2800's video digitizer card. I have my VCR connected the same way via a video source selector.

The picture from a CED actually looks a bit better than the picture from a VHS cassette on this projector. VHS video always seems to have small parts in the picture which "shiver" horizontally as the digitizer tries to map the constantly fluctuating analog signal to discrete pixels. CEDs do not show this characteristic on the projector. I was using a low-cost late-1980s Magnavox VCR and thought the lower signal-to-noise ratio may have been part of the problem, but switching to a higher-end Panasonic 4-head Hi-Fi VCR from 1999 did not improve the picture. While the contrast is sometimes better on VHS movies of later vintage due to the improved mastering and recording processes, CED seems to generally share the same sharpness and has no trace of the horizontal errors I see on VHS.

Perhaps someone has a theory that explains why this characteristic is so distinct on my equipment.

[ae.tc]

Here's the widescreen CED release of Holy Grail. Picture quality is excellent on this disc. Here shown on a 32" ViewSonic LCD HDTV using composite video input, player is the SKT-400 :::



- few more images at
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•• about me: æ.tc •• SKT 400 • LDR 600 • CLD-D604 • CLD-52 • CLD-2080 ••

[dcayea]

This past weekend I finally picked up a high def television. Wal-Mart had one of their one day oober-specials. They had a Sanyo 46 inch 1080p SHDTV with 3 rca and 3 hdmi inputs for $798. The quality of CED going in is okay.

I know with John at CEDatum looking to make RCA boards for mono models, I would argue, why not make some kind of upscale conversion board... now that would be a feat!

[ae.tc]

Good deal!
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•• about me: æ.tc •• SKT 400 • LDR 600 • CLD-D604 • CLD-52 • CLD-2080 ••