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CED, the best media for long term storage ?

 
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Bildplattenspieler



Joined: 04 Dec 2015
Posts: 2
Location: Bremen, Germany

PostPosted: Fri Dec 04, 2015 2:13 pm    Post subject: CED, the best media for long term storage ? Reply with quote

The problem of long term storage is evident, schools and universities,
but even movie archives have many films on video or dvd.
VHS videos, dependent from the quality of the tape, age relatively fast.
The error rate is high, beta is better, but the main problem is the tape.

In the mid 80s, some universities and fewer schools bought laserdisc
for "lifetime archivement". But most of the early laserdiscs look terrible
today (laserrot), they made many mistakes in the production process,
especially the main producer PDO UK, that was the main company
for the european market.
( You have the same problem with the Discovision Titles from MCA )

Not all titles are for sale on 16mm or 35mm film, universities - at least
in most parts of Europe - have smaller budgets as in the past,
so why are CEDs not an option for long term storage ?
Apart from the "click" mechanism, if the CED is played on a player
with a good stylus, the CED vinyl, like a music record, is much more
reliable and withstands the storm of time better as laserdiscs.
It is even easier to (re-)build a player, becaue the main problem for future
generations isnt the software, but the hardware.

So I really astonishes me, that CED isnt playing a role, when
professionals and academics talk about the problem of long term
storage. At least in North America.
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SelectaVision420



Joined: 25 Mar 2012
Posts: 1424
Location: Hartford

PostPosted: Fri Dec 04, 2015 6:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i am honestly fascinated that any of these discs lasted this long.. i have some discs that play as if they were brand new and they are over 30 years old...
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kitchensynch



Joined: 24 Feb 2013
Posts: 1087

PostPosted: Sat Dec 05, 2015 11:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You have some serious obstacles to overcome to make this a reality. One is definitely the fact that CED took longer than optical storage to realize as a consumer product.

It was refigured once or twice along the way, the caddy (intregral sleeve necessary to protect it from damage) came later in development and this also made it fairly heavy.

Laserdiscs, while having distinctive quality shortcomings that mainly related to misconceptions over how much complexity would really be inherent to manufacture consistenyly higher quality porducts (i.e. the errors introduced by poor bonding of the two sides and the aforementioned rot from the introduction oxygen between the sides). In other words, Lou Wassermanm the head of MCA/Universal thought it would be as easy as pressing records...as a record and film company executive he had no knowledge of the inherent difficulties presented by the process.

Laservision/Laserdisc was the most advanced optically read playback system around at that time. All others were prototypical or failed ventures. What Pioneer knew it to do was to rescue the format and they saw how it was critical to the very survival of the company in the 1980s. IBM tried to help Discovision Associates to fix the company and it's products and they left, angered, as did Philips when MCA made changes to the format that made Philips own Magnavox players error prone through no fault of Philips' own, as they kept the standards as they always did and committed to them...this would benefit them when the Compact Disc was introduced.

In comparison, CED had resolution properties inferior to the all frequency modulation based system used for the Laserdisc. The matter of improving the playback qualities of optical discs was realized early on and stereo sound was not an option, it was standard on LD.

And videocassettes, with their inherent and very desirable recording capabilities was exactly what the home video consumer wanted. The ability to save video programs like recording a record or the radio made even low-grade videotaping quality a big plus. Mastering a CED and recording a cassette are two highly opposite side of a need for reproduction.

In the end even price advantages could not save CED against taping, or even the video rental market, even with no competition whatsoever from computer media..

It was Pioneer that closed poorly performing US plants, improved others and moved a lot of production to Japan. Pioneer helped to develop the playback technology to make it in everyway the analog prototype of the DVD, as LD became a testbed for nearly every aspect of the DVD system's features. LD probably saved Pioneer more than once from failure as it helped them to become a more digital audio and consumer video oriented company as well as a large player in computer optical drives and advanced display technologies.

The technologies that created CEDs are not so easily resurrected, the patents and machinery are not readily available and the cost to achieve a relatively small endeavor, especially after 30 years and the ascension of magnetic and solid state memory storage devices is very prohibitive and impractical. Even if CED had survived modern innovations would have rendered it obsolete. Phonograph records are still with us 138 years later because of niche market demand. CED was not only terminated, it marked the end of the run of the original RCA itself. The company did not survive it's debts, many from developing CED but many more from poor marketing in general leading to bleeding debts. Even after selling the financial arm that became CIT Financial AND the National Broadcasting Company network, RCA simply could not survive and it closed. The company brands and properties were dispersed, the record label went to BMG, then Sony, certain appliance and electronics, accessory products to Thomsen, Audiovox and the brand was no longer truly an American one.

The Radio Corporation of America, formed during World War I to pool patents and keep them from the hands of enemy forces, found itself shot in the tranches of red ink nearly 70 years later.
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7jlong



Joined: 01 Jun 2004
Posts: 187

PostPosted: Tue Dec 22, 2015 12:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A couple of points:

"But most of the early laserdiscs look terrible today (laserrot)"

At lddb.com there are almost 5000 rot reports regarding about 3000 individual titles. This is out of about 55,000 titles cataloged at that site. Looking through the rot reports it is actually mostly later titles. The myth of Laserdisc rot (and CD rot) continues to be severely overstated. I owned about 200 Laserdiscs at the height of my collection, and only two showed signs of rot. I still have about 80 of them, all fine.

(incidentally, I own about 1400 compact discs - and just three of them show 'bronzing' or 'CD rot'. the rest - as old as 1983 and as new as this year - are all fine)

"if the CED is played on a player with a good stylus, the CED vinyl, like a music record, is much more reliable and withstands the storm of time better as laserdiscs."

I don't think I agree. CED, being a 'contact' format, begins to pick up wear as soon as the needle drops on the disc for the first time - just like vinyl records. Laserdisc, on the other hand, is only ever touched by light and theoretically (as mentioned, the theory is holding true for many discs) will be unchanged from factory to grave. This can't be said of any CED or vinyl record that has ever been played - even once.

Finally, as kitchensynch mentions CED resolution is actually fairly poor (relative to the amount of detail found on a 35mm or even 16mm print) - and I think less than 5 movie titles (as opposed to TV shows) were released on CED without panning-and-scanning. I guess I don't see cropped and compromised material as being well-suited for an archive.

Don't get me wrong, Laserdisc is also a poor candidate for archiving film history due to its limited (by today's terms) resolution. Advances in film scanning and restoration have been able to coax detail and shading out of old films that hasn't been seen by the public since the movies first played in the theater. How do we store and preserve that data? Don't know. But old dead formats probably ain't it.
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RT9342



Joined: 29 Nov 2006
Posts: 224
Location: San Antonio, TX

PostPosted: Tue Dec 22, 2015 4:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Those of you who know me probably know I collect laserdiscs as well as CED (and have one of the earliest produced PR-7820 DiscoVision players) - I will say that overall, I agree that CED seems to last longer. However, I do want to point out that only a small percentage of my laserdiscs (including older ones) have gotten laser-rot symptoms, and I've had a CED disc that actually got laser-rot like symptoms (though it may have been a storage issue, possibly high heat). I seem to notice too that my CED discs eventually get either dirty or scratched up or something. I guess all formats have their issues that can make them problematic for long term storage. Has anyone seen the articles about the Blu-Ray mastering of Jaws? They pulled out the original film from the archives so that they could make a clean high-definition scan without the extra film grain that shows up in duplicate films. And when they did, they found the original film to be badly yellowed and faded. They still used it, but did digital color correction. So I guess even 35mm film is not good for archiving. How about platinum CEDs? Now that might make a great format for archiving, assuming standard resolution composite video is acceptable. Smile
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