CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[rsrendfeld]

Tonight while watching SHAMPOO, a VideoDisc title issued in 1985, I noticed the Closed Captioned imprint at the lower right corner of the front cover.
I tried to access the captions but could not find a way to get my Dimensia model # FPR2722N TV / Monitor to display the captions.
I checked the owners manuals for the FPR2722N built 5/87 AND the FCK2601T built 10/84 and found NO mention of the CLOSED CAPTION feature.
How can I get these TVs to display the captions????
I think it would be very odd of RCA to make Videodiscs with the Closed Caption feature but fail to enable their top of the line TVs to use the feature.
What am I doing wrong??

Ron in Indianapolis

[Jesse Skeen]

VERY few TVs had closed-captioning built in until 1993, when the FCC started requiring that all TVs include it. Closed-captioning started out on TV in 1980, but to see it you had to buy a decoder box which usually included its own tuner. I've seen a couple at thrift stores, they look like the large early VCRs with the VHF and UHF dials on the front. It seems to have taken a couple years for pre-recorded home video to have captions; I heard "Flashdance" was one of the first to have them. I once saw an old Columbia VHS tape of "Brian's Song" that had a sticker on the front saying "This tape specially prepared with closed-captions", and this is the only CED title I know of on the RCA label that has captions.

I have a few off-air recordings that show closed-captioning in its testing stages; in early 1980 the ABC network would run a continuous loop showing all available characters and "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" (a common typing-practice phrase as it includes all letters of the alphabet) and text explaining what captions would be used for. There were initially 2 channels of captions; ABC ran a similar test loop on Caption 2 for several years, and also 2 channels of text where the entire screen was filled with a black box and text scrolled on it. ABC used one channel of this for a schedule of all captioned shows for the week, and the other had news and sports scores. They seem to have discontinued those by the early 90s and I haven't seen them used anywhere else since.
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