CED Digest Vol. 3 No. 31

CED Digest Vol. 3 No. 31 • 8/1/1998
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1998 08:47:15 -0500
From: Geoff Oltmans 
To: Tom Howe <ceds@teleport.com>
Subject: FS: Sears/Hitachi Stereo Player

Well, I thought I'd give this another go, so here it is:

I have a Sears/Hitachi Stereo player, model # 934.54811350. It has 7
control switches on the front. The player turns on and starts playing
when a disc is inserted, and stops and powers off when the disk is
removed. It has a gold metallized finish that has a few scuffs on it,
but no more than you would expect for a player made in '84. I replaced
the belts a few months ago, and the stylus is still sharp and it plays
well.

I'm asking $75.00 obo.

Thanks!

*Geoff!*

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From: "Daniel P. Cayea" 
To: ceds@teleport.com
Subject: RCA SJT-100's 
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1998 07:40:39 PDT

Telecom Technologies Incorporated through our subsiduate Telecom
Capacitance Electronics is now offering RCA SJT-100 Videodisc players in 
two package options for sale!

Package One:RCA SJT-100
15 Day Limited Warranty*
Price - $50.00, and does not include shipping***

Package Two:RCA SJT-100
Limited Lifetime Warranty**
Price - $75.00, and does include shipping.***

FOR MORE INFORMATION WRITE TO tti@westelcom.com ON THIS OFFER!

*15 Day Limited Warranty does include stylus & belts, and does include
circuitry and integrated electronics. 

**Limited Lifetime Warranty does not include stylus and belts but does 
include circuitry and integrated electronics. ***Pending on player 
weight, shipping may be either 4th Class Certified or Priority Mail, 
pending on consumer demand of TTI.  Shipping may also take up to four 
weeks pending on availbility of players, player testing (for warranty 
protection)and etcetera.

Daniel P. Cayea
Telecom Technologies 

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From: LAWPATS
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 09:46:34 EDT
To: ceds@teleport.com
Subject: Re: CED Digest Vol. 3 No. 30

Hi -- I enjoy your web site and the newsletter.  I have an RCA SJT400 (my
second one) -- on which I recently installed a new drive belt and stylus.  I
had not used the player in years.  The player now takes the disc and plays
them, but an old problem has resurfaced.  The screen is washed out, even the
player data --time, track, "reject", "pause" etc., looks blurred or smeared.
Sometimes it will clear itself up, but for the most part it seems that every
light colored part of the picture is smeared over the rest of the picture.
When CED was still being sold in the stores, I took one player (SJT400) with
the same problem for repair - and they never did fix it.  Any ideas?

Thanks,

Dan

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Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 07:53:30 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jesse Skeen
To: Tom Howe <ceds@teleport.com>
Subject: Re: CED Digest Vol. 3 No. 29

I heard from someone a while back that the "interactive" player will 
actually damage your discs. It's OK to use the normal player functions on 
the 400, but I've been told that if you use any of the 'special' features 
like band search, etc, then the disc will get "scratched somewhat fierce" 
as he put it. This is why I haven't been searching the globe for one, and 
if I ever do find one I don't even know if I'll buy it if this is true. 
("Is this true? Is this horrible thing true?"- Henry Gibson as Wilbur the 
pig in 'Charlotte's Web')
I do have "Murder Anyone?" which does play back with the "nonsensical 
results" as Tom put it, at the end there's several minutes of a screen 
saying you've won the game or something like that. Doesn't look like it 
had much replay value as a game regardless of whether it worked or not. I 
also have "A Week at the Races" which is fun to watch because of the guy 
obviously reading everything off cue cards and there's lots of nice horse 
racing video footage too, again though what good is this as a game once 
you've seen every clip and know who's going to win?
I'm fortunate enough to have one of the VCRs that has digital special 
effects, a great feature which for some insane reason is not available on 
any current VCR models anymore. Once you've got it you can't live without 
it, I use it as my main TV tuner because you can just hit a button and 
get a perfect still-frame, no tape required! This is also extremely 
useful with my CLV format laserdiscs, which my player can't still-frame, 
and of course CEDs, which is physically impossible to still-frame (the 
'page mode' just repeats 4 frames over and over as that's how many are on 
each rotation) I wonder if this technology would have been built into 
future CED players had the format survived. Since I like to study a lot 
of my videos up-close, this VCR was worth what I paid for it even if it 
didn't have the S-VHS recorder built in :)   If I went into an 
electronics store today and was forced to pick out a new VCR, I honestly 
don't think there are any that I'd really want. Last time I looked a lot 
of them didn't even seem to have any buttons on the machine OR the 
remote! If I ever need a brand-new one then -maybe- a pro model might do 
it for me (and what's the deal with Hi-Fi machines not being able to play 
linear stereo? I have a lot of non Hi-Fi stereo tapes so I'd have to 
watch them in mono if I didn't have the older model that has both regular 
and Hi-Fi stereo!)
I like being able to watch the old RCA opening disc logos in slow-motion, 
there's a couple frames with (gasp!) a little dirt on them. By the way 
has anyone noticed that there's actually TWO slightly different versions 
of the original opening, the less common one the music at the end plays 
noticably slower and the colors are a bit different. I know "The French 
Connection" has this one on it. Anyone know the story on this?
OK, one more question; my posts always get longer than intended- has 
anyone compiled a list of material that is, has, was, and most likely 
always will be available on CED ONLY? Obviously the demo footage from the 
promo discs won't be on DVD anytime soon, although I've made tapes of 
these for those who otherwise would never have seen them. Other stuff I 
have that I've never seen anywhere else include a 1954 stop-motion 
animated movie of "Hansel and Gretel", the notes on the back cover says 
these were actually electronic puppets but doesn't say how they worked, 
the movie starts out with this boring intro in black and white where all 
you see is the hands of a guy holding a book and smoking a cigarette as 
he reads something about the animation process used in the movie.
Lots of music videos I have were either on tape at one point or made for 
cable, but many seem impossible to find on any other format today. 
Totally Go-Go's, one of my favorites, was on cassette from Thorn/EMI for 
a while, I don't know if it was even in stereo. This disc does turn up 
quite more often than you'd expect. I've also got stuff like the Doobie 
Brothers HBO special that I've never seen on any other format. BTW, the 
Joni Mitchell "Shadows and Light" concert was made for the MCA 
Discovision laserdisc label, but when they went under after suffering 
notorious defects, Pioneer took over and got the manufacturing process 
down right and completed post-production on this and released it as one 
of the first Pioneer Artists discs (Warner also put this out on tape.) I 
have an RCA disc of episodes of the 1960's Spiderman cartoon show (yes, 
THAT one with the unforgettable theme song) that I don't believe exist on 
tape, sadly they didn't include the "In Color" intro I remember from the 
very beginning of the show (I didn't know Ralph Bakshi was involved in 
this show til I read the cover though.) Lots of the sports titles like 
"Miracle at Lake Placid" and TV compilations like "Don Kirshner's Rock 
Concert" seem impossible to find except on CED too.
Re: "Bobbie Joe and the Outlaw"- when I found this in a used record store 
they told me that Lynda Carter, after hitting it big, has been trying to 
buy every existing copy of this movie so no one ever sees it again, 
because she appears nude in part of it. Luckily they only charged me 5 
bucks for this even though they convinced me I had a real collectors' 
item on my hands. (This place has some old Discovision laserdiscs like 
Saturday Night Fever and Electric Horseman that they want 100 bucks 
for!!) Vestron Video certainly put out the most interesting stuff on CED, 
the format just wouldn't be the same without it (I still love how on most 
discs they cram side 1 as far as it can go to 60 minutes, then sometimes 
have as few as 10 minutes total on side 2 on short movies! BTW if you 
have "Sex on the Run" watch it with the volume up high and you can hear a 
radio station in the background, at one point you can even hear the DJ 
identify it!)
I also love the other weird kids' stuff like "As We Grow," which is a 
video-ized version of those dreaded "sound filmstrips" we used to be 
subjected to in school (do they still use those damn things?) Notice 
there are NO moving pictures in the whole thing, but they try to make it 
more interesting by doing stuff like panning the camera across the 
pictures and stuff like that. This was from Scholastic Productions, a 
name I remember very well from my early school years, are they still 
around? There's also Learning Corporation of America's "Family 
Entertainment Playhouse" which were shown in classes on 16mm film and 
usually followed by a class discussion on what important message the 
story they just saw had. There were 2 volumes of these gems, again which 
I've never seen available on any other video format, volume 1 features a 
very young Anthony Michael Hall in one story (thanks for this one Tom!)
Which leads me to another subject I could go on and on about but won't, 
watching a lot of these old movies you can sometimes see actors playing 
bit parts who became/are more famous today. Can anybody think of some, 
like Jim Carrey's appearance in "Peggy Sue got Married" which I think 
came out after CED died, also any other stuff that's only obtainable on 
CED? (Mono versions of the Jane Fonda workouts did make it to tape but 
still say "produced by RCA Videodiscs", as did Dr. Spock's "Caring for your 
Newborn", sad to say.)
This is getting long, so even though I haven't written in a while I'm 
gonna go, since I'm actually up at an early hour I'm gonna make an hour's 
trip out to the area's only mid-week flea market in beautiful Galt, CA, 
followed by a thrifting expedition in nearby Stockton where I've gotten a 
lot of my best CEDs from (including my first copy of "Star Wars" during 
my first month of collecting.)

Alan Smithee (who to his knowledge has none of his films on CED, just his 
contribution to the John Landis segment of "Twilight Zone the Movie".)
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