CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[rsrendfeld]

If the VideoDisc program had not been canceled, What would the third generation discplayers been like?

There are big differences between the SGT250 and SJT/SKT discplayers.
The SJT/SKT appear to be much less complex and have fare fewer parts and fewer precision parts. I suspect the SJT/SKT was much cheaper build.
So.
How would the next generations players have been improved?
What new features.
Could manufacturing costs been reduced?

Ron Rendfeld
Indianapolis IN.

Gravity always wins.

[dcayea]

I have a theory and a question, maybe somebody (Tom?) can chime in? I think as the evolution of the microchip progressed that the players would use less and less IC's.

My question is, what prevents this medium form ever being optical? In theory couldn't some kind of optic track the patterns in the grooves?

[Jesse Skeen]

There were record players that played records with a laser, but they were super expensive- several thousand dollars.
_________________
Videodisc and stereo sound- there's no better value around!

[RT9342]

I led a long discussion about optical playback on CED's several years ago on an old post - just to briefly recap, it was mentioned that RCA used a HeNe laser (like what was found in the early LaserDisc players) to play the copper masters in order to make sure that they were properly recorded, but playback of a black vinyl disc is kind of tricky due to the fact that the disc doesn't reflect a laser very well, unless you fire the laser beam at an odd angle to get a reflection, but then you make the optical mechanism much more complex, which costs a lot (like with those optical record players).

Of course, I'm certainly not ruling out the possiblity of playing CED's with a laser, but I just don't think that it would have been something implemented in a consumer CED player during the 80's & 90's, had CED stayed on the market longer.

Since some of the former RCA technicians have posted information on this forum before, it would be nice to see if any of them may have had some insight on plans that RCA might have devised but then scrapped.

Being that I'm also a LaserDisc collector, and seeing how the LaserDisc players evolved, here are some of my theories as to what would have eventually showed up on 3rd generation, 4th generation, etc. CED players:

- The later players would have almost certainly not have been as tall. Due to the format, there's not a lot that can be done to reduce the depth or the width of the player (and since all of the CED players were the standard DIN width, I don't think they would have changed the width any), but by reducing the circuits (with fewer IC's, as dcayea has mentioned) and revising the mechanics, the player could be made shorter.

- On-screen displays, high-speed scan, auto stylus sweeping, and remote control would have probably eventually become standard on all new models by no later than the late 80's.

- By around '84 or '85, they probably would have added some kind of digital or Hi-Fi audio tracks, along with the conventional analog tracks. The players that supported those tracks would probably have both an automatic mode (play digital if it's on the disc, analog if it's not), or a manual mode (for STEREO bilingual discs, or for commentaries, like the Apollo 13 LaserDisc with stereo movie tracks, an analog track with the director's commentary, and an analog track with Jim Lovell's commentary).

- I could see the possibility of auto-reverse players eventally seeing the light. But I couldn't guess if they would use a flipping mechanism (like in the auto-reverse LaserDisc players) or two seperate styli (though perhaps with a shared amplifier or even a shared resonator). Being that there were even LaserDisc players that could accept two LaserDiscs at once (so that you didn't even have to switch discs for side 3), they may have done the same with CED, though I'm sure it would only be on the high-end models.

- If CED had made it into the Dolby days, I'm sure that the L-R channel (for stereo seperation on the analog audio tracks) would have eventually become an AC-3 channel on all of the mid-to-late 90's discs. Like the LaserDiscs with AC-3 audio, you would need a higher end player to get surround sound - otherwise you either watched the movie in stereo if your player had digital tracks, or you watched it in mono if you had an old analog-only player (at least with the CED format, you wouldn't need to manually turn off the AC-3 track in order to stop that annoying nuissance that you get on a LaserDisc player if you don't manually turn off the R channel).

- I also wouldn't have been surprised if some kind of S-CED or Hi-CED was developed, but that would of course had caused compatibility issues, and perhaps something like that would have ended up being one of those formats that was only released in Japan (like the Hi-Vision LaserDiscs).

- I would also imagine that once digital video capturing became cheaper in the 90's, they would have been able to implement freeze-frame and even slow-mode on the CED format.