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RCA CED Video Discs

I believe that I have Star Wars Ep 4, Star Trek The Motion Picture (x2), a pair of Star Trek episodes and some Beatles stuff on CED disks. No way of playing them though.
 
That's cool. I have a few select movies on Laserdisc when I went on that collecting spree for a short stint. Had them for a few years before I finally found someone with a (single sided) player but it had the remote and he actually showed me it worked at his home. Quite interesting (and wow the size of the remote is humorous.. literally the dimensions (except hight) of a brick) but he had two of them he had just gotten because his had died. Evidently he still watches laserdisc movies and offered a selection with the player as well (made me feel bad picking through his collection but he seemed to be the type that bought them but already watched them so didn't care.

Anyway, I ended up finding someone at a ham fest a year or two ago with a crap load of ced's. Basically wanted to sell them all for a few bucks or all of them for something that would be closer to $.50/each but since he had a few hundred wasn't a steal ;-) I bought Watership Down since I enjoyed that book, movie, and song as a child. But yeah no way to play it heh. Eventually I'll track down a player and check out the quality.
 
CED was a very cool concept. this all happened before i was born ('84) but yeah obviously VHS won out over everything else, sadly. i picked up a laserdisc player for like $20 back in 2002 or so, and i watch video on it quite often. the quality is fantastic. i would also love a CED player one of these day, it's such an interesting method of video playback!
 
barythrin said:
That's cool. I have a few select movies on Laserdisc when I went on that collecting spree for a short stint. Had them for a few years before I finally found someone with a (single sided) player but it had the remote and he actually showed me it worked at his home. Quite interesting (and wow the size of the remote is humorous.. literally the dimensions (except hight) of a brick) but he had two of them he had just gotten because his had died. Evidently he still watches laserdisc movies and offered a selection with the player as well (made me feel bad picking through his collection but he seemed to be the type that bought them but already watched them so didn't care.

Anyway, I ended up finding someone at a ham fest a year or two ago with a crap load of ced's. Basically wanted to sell them all for a few bucks or all of them for something that would be closer to $.50/each but since he had a few hundred wasn't a steal ;-) I bought Watership Down since I enjoyed that book, movie, and song as a child. But yeah no way to play it heh. Eventually I'll track down a player and check out the quality.
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about the remote, was it a Pioneer unit? my LD-V2200's remote is literally the size of a VHS tape, almost exactly. it's crazy! lol.
 
I used a similar model while in middle and high school in science class. the remote was HUGE and the barcode reader wasn't the greatest. We also had those same units hooked up to Apple IIs, the software was actually Appleworks running custom Time-Out! macros. GS/OS on the IIgs also had control drivers for those players built into the OS. You could kludge together an early interactive video system using Hypercard/Hyper Studio, the Apple Video Overlay card and one of these RS-232 serial equipped LD players if you wished.

Plenty of early industrial LD players in that video.
 
I have a laser disc player if anyone is interested in it. Mine was used in education, I can post the specs if there is interest.
 
REply to Kevin.

REply to Kevin.

You are so so right. One thing most people do not know is that when RCA pulled the plug on CED they had a new player being assembled in Mexico - it was stereo and had a $99 price tag and a deal for the consumer - buy xx movies and get the player for free. They had 100,000 units in various stages of completion and junked them all. The main problem was the ability of VHS to record shows off of TV for viewing at the consumer's choice of time. I am selling off the last of my CEDs $1-4 each and ship them 10 discs in a pack [$8-10 USPS - parcel post at a weight of about 17 pounds] Listed on Bonanza.com and eBay.
Real1shepherd said:
If anybody is still reading this, I can give you some consumer history. Millions were poured into this technology until RCA pulled the plug. It was a total -'You snooze, you loose' marketing debacle. They took too long to get everything to market. Initially, it was a much better picture than VHS and fractionally better than Beta. Most of us were still using LP turntables and so the concept worked on us; very light tracking stylus to produce stereo and movie images.

I bought one new and was very happy with it at first. But very shortly after that Pioneer came out with their laser disc system and had even better picture. VHS was steadily become the 'winners' choice and their picture was improving as well.

What you have to remember was how the rental shops handled all this "technology". First the shops divided the areas between Beta and VHS. Clever marketing won VHS the stronghold, because Beta machines and picture were actually better! Many rental shops had all three; Beta, VHS and CED for rent. Some adventurous shops had just CED....very short lived success and a fatal decision on their part.

I drug my feet or I could have had hundreds upon hundred of titles for pennies on the dollar when these rental places went out. I was just never in the right place at the right time.:-( I still have my machine and a few movies, but would like an entire collection. As far as shipping, book rate is the only way to go, but SLOW. There is a difference between rental discs and homeowner- the rentals ones suffered from many machines that were abused. The discs can be cleaned on a record cleaning machine, but you lose the silicone sealer treatment on the surface itself. Personally, I don't think it's a big deal to lose the treatment, but a gain to make the movies more playable.

Also, there are still RCA people retired, who repair and fiddle with these machines. So...they are fixable, but the movies however, are what they are. Beware of people who claim all their movies play well. The CED definition of "playing well" is that the movie doesn't skip so badly it stalls. In other words, it plays it through, however rough and flawed sound and picture are.

Kevin
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I apologize to All for not continuing this old thread. I actually didn't know that it had continued. I guess I also missed the chance to buy some more CED's...darn.

One point I forgot to mention in my original post was that RCA was working on CED technology in the late 60's. Dragging their feet until 1981 to release the machine and the movies was inexcusably egregious. So in reality, they were doomed before they even released the first machine. So much was going on with VHS and Beta and much more to come, while the CED technology was finite and not update-able. I'm only into CED's for sentimental reasons as it is. What I'm really looking for is a large collection for peanuts. There have been many collections just given away. I appreciate the principles of supply & demand, but I also covet the idea of free will....the ability to choose NOT to buy from ebay sharks. Ebay is the last place on Earth you should be trying to put together a collection of CED's. If however, you need that ONE CED that you can't find anywhere else....

I have very few movies that play all the way through without at least a hiccup or two....when you forget you're watching a CED, you know you've got a nice disc! Storing them in garages and attics was NOT healthy for them. Moreover, laying them FLAT in large stacks virtually ruined them forever. The weight of the stack would force scratches onto the discs. Like LP's, you can often judge the condition by pulling(carefully!) the cassette open and looking at the record surface.

In spite of all that, for whatever the technical reason, the blue tones from the movies on these discs have no equal, exaggerated or not. Another thing to remember is that a lot of the old movies offered where reproduced from well used master sources. There was no digital processing then, so with the older movies sold on CED's, not only do you have the original CED hiccups, but you have actual old movie flaws built into you copy. I can't imagine anyone brought up in the digital age tolerating any of this....not even for its quirkiness.

And yes, VHS movies and Beta movies were outrageously expensive, originally. Therefore, 99% of us rented. Initially that was the lure of the CED-affordable movies that rivaled VHS and Beta in quality. If RCA had just released CED's ten yrs earlier, our video discussion would be quite different right now.

Kevin



UncleAl said:
You are so so right. One thing most people do not know is that when RCA pulled the plug on CED they had a new player being assembled in Mexico - it was stereo and had a $99 price tag and a deal for the consumer - buy xx movies and get the player for free. They had 100,000 units in various stages of completion and junked them all. The main problem was the ability of VHS to record shows off of TV for viewing at the consumer's choice of time. I am selling off the last of my CEDs $1-4 each and ship them 10 discs in a pack [$8-10 USPS - parcel post at a weight of about 17 pounds] Listed on Bonanza.com and eBay.
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Where abouts are you located Kevin? Quite a few times at HAM radio conventions/shows I've seen collections (and on craigslist here and there) for something around $.50/ced if one was to buy the entire collection. Otherwise they're a few bucks if you like the cover art of any of them ;-) (I bought watership down just because I loved it as a kid and it was my birthday the day I found it). I was always amazed at the lack of a price on CEDs though but I suppose there isn't really any way to see the condition of the disc (well I guess there is if you know how to open the case thing properly).

I never saw beta outside of the video store as a kid but yeah I remember hearing the prices. One previous employee at my other job remembered paying $90 or so for Top Gun on betamax heh. Unbelievable to me.
 
A couple of my college classmates spent a mint on VHS and laserdiscs. I was always a renter and not a buyer, even now my DVD collection is like a dozen movies and the complete farscape series.
 
Real1shepherd said:
If RCA had just released CED's ten yrs earlier, our video discussion would be quite different right now.
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The problem for both CED and LaserDisc was that watching movies was not the primary reason most people bought VCRs. It was to record and play back TV programs. You couldn't even fit a movie onto Beta when it first came out, because the first-generation machines and tapes were limited to 1 hour. However, once VHS (and to a lesser extent Beta) reached a critical mass, it allowed the home video market to flourish, despite the drawbacks of watching movies on a small TV screen with lo-fi mono sound, and that's what opened the door for CED and LaserDisc.

So without VHS and Beta driving the market forward and getting enough people interested in watching movies at home as a secondary benefit in addition to recording TV programs, there simply wouldn't have been enough consumer demand if CED had been released first and had attempted to create the home video market all by itself. Cartrivision tried that in 1972 and failed, despite having 200 movie titles available upon release (didn't CED only have 50 titles available upon its release?).
 
Here's a database of known CEDs. It suggests (a list of titles in the US?) "This is a listing of the approximately 1,700 NTSC CED titles that I know exist (meaning I have actually seen the disc and scanned the bar code directly off the caddy)."
 
thats a pretty high-end player! mine's junk.
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That's the same player I have, but I dont have a remote for mine. It really is a nice machine and supports stereo sound. Unfortunately, I only have three stereo CEDs (they came in a blue caddy). There were other colored caddies which stood for certain types of disks, but I can't remember what they were.
 
I live in Eastern Wa...never been to a HAM fest, although I always wanted to try one. I've hear about prices like that, but never experienced them.
 
vwestlife said:
The problem for both CED and LaserDisc was that watching movies was not the primary reason most people bought VCRs. It was to record and play back TV programs. You couldn't even fit a movie onto Beta when it first came out, because the first-generation machines and tapes were limited to 1 hour. However, once VHS (and to a lesser extent Beta) reached a critical mass, it allowed the home video market to flourish, despite the drawbacks of watching movies on a small TV screen with lo-fi mono sound, and that's what opened the door for CED and LaserDisc.

So without VHS and Beta driving the market forward and getting enough people interested in watching movies at home as a secondary benefit in addition to recording TV programs, there simply wouldn't have been enough consumer demand if CED had been released first and had attempted to create the home video market all by itself. Cartrivision tried that in 1972 and failed, despite having 200 movie titles available upon release (didn't CED only have 50 titles available upon its release?).
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We've had this discussion before and it belies the fact that in most homes, playback only devices were always popular. What lured people in were the amount & variety of titles. If you could brag that your medium had over a thousand titles(and more coming) for example, then the consumer thought, "I think they're on to something." Because after all, we are nothing more than pack animals with regard to consumerism....always have been. And it would have helped if a big, respected company like RCA had been driving CED's in the 70's. In fact that's a lot of the reason people did buy CED"S; that it was driven by respectable RCA.
 
barythrin said:
Here's a database of known CEDs. It suggests (a list of titles in the US?) "This is a listing of the approximately 1,700 NTSC CED titles that I know exist (meaning I have actually seen the disc and scanned the bar code directly off the caddy)."
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Yeah, I have the same list off a CED group. It's pretty amazing really and a real slice of Americana history-especially the stuff fresh released in the 80's. There were games, mystery and educational/arts CED's along with some real stellar music CED's. I love some of the music group CED's....

Kevin
 
Unknown_K said:
A couple of my college classmates spent a mint on VHS and laserdiscs. I was always a renter and not a buyer, even now my DVD collection is like a dozen movies and the complete farscape series.
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Well, you could always brag that you're ahead of the game. You've not historically, given up the space and fraught over all the different media choices over the decades. I say this as I sit and view walls of CD's and old VHS tapes that I don't have the time to transfer over.....not to mention the CED's that I hide from public view. Friends used to think the CED's were quite novel yrs ago. Now they just think they're weird.....and me for having them

Kevin
 
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