8mm Forum: I'm learning about C.E.D. Capacitance Electronic Video Disc

This is topic I'm learning about C.E.D. Capacitance Electronic Video Disc in forum General Yak at 8mm Forum.

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Posted by Clinton Hunt (Member # 2072) on January 01, 2017, 11:08 PM:

These were released on the home market in 1981 I believe.
What a great idea as it's a record with a movie on it,it uses a stylus to play it.
I would've been 18 yrs old when it was released overseas and what usually happens that we in New Zealand get new technologies once all the bugs were ironed out so-to-speak.
I've been watching Youtube videos on it and it really is interesting :-)
Then I did the eBay search and the discs are cheap but the players are very expensive with the postage!
Cool idea though :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K46rnOya5Vo

Posted by Dave Groves (Member # 4685) on January 02, 2017, 06:16 AM:

I rember seeing one working in a shop but wasn't too impressed by the idea or the picture quality. It didn't take off and discs were sold off cheaply. Optical discs were probably too much competition.

Posted by Paul Adsett (Member # 25) on January 02, 2017, 09:49 AM:

The CED disc and players were invented and manufactured by RCA. They had a special facility built to just manufacture the discs.
Once the initial bugs were fixed they actually worked very well, but were killed off by VHS tape which had longer run time and of course enabled recording off the TV.
Surprisingly, Blackhawk Films were licensed to sell both the players and discs, and I remember seeing them advertised in Blackhawk's monthly catalogue.

Posted by Paul Suchy (Member # 80) on January 02, 2017, 11:00 AM:

I had a CED disc player and the image and sound quality was excellent. Unfortunately, the tiny grooves and lubricant on the discs caused them to skip and you could run the stylus back and forth on the section that skipped in order to clear out the excess lube, but it didn't always work. The hard plastic casing went into the machine so the disc itself was never touched, but they were very heavy; a dozen discs were about all I purchased and the stack weighed a ton! I gave the player and discs to a friend who worked for a department store that carried CED discs, and he was one of those people who was content having his 5 favorite movies and he used it for years. I purchased a laserdisc player a year later and although not perfect, they were much less trouble than CED.

Posted by Maurice Leakey (Member # 916) on January 02, 2017, 11:41 AM:

I understand that RCA lost an estimated $600 million with their short-lived CEDs.

Posted by Clinton Hunt (Member # 2072) on January 02, 2017, 04:09 PM:

And I read that if they released the format in 1977 i think it was as when they planned to ,it might've done well ?

Posted by Paul Adsett (Member # 25) on January 02, 2017, 04:13 PM:

But a great idea nevertheless, at the time it must have seemed like a logical progression of the audio LP record to the RCA engineers.
Another idea at the time, that I seem to vaguely recall, was an invention by CBS to print movies on to super 8 film by direct scanning of each frame with an electron beam. One can imagine that the definition would have been far superior to optical reduction from 16mm or 35mm. But, for whatever reason, the system never took off.

Posted by Brian Fretwell (Member # 4302) on January 02, 2017, 04:40 PM:

I believe the electron beam system was for use with TV playback in mind. The write-up I saw said it used B&W film and could either record 2 B&W pictures or separate b&w and chroma frames of a colour (or should that be color) picture which were scanned and sent to the TV as a signal to be displayed. Shades of SVideo outputs of DVD players.

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on January 03, 2017, 12:51 PM:

I must say, I was always fascinated with these earlier "laserdiscs"! I mean, for some odd reason, it seemed more plausible with the much more well known laserdiscs to play, but these other discs to play video as well as audio, being made out of the same materials as you would for a regular LP record, well, i thought it was magic ....

Until I realized that, just like you're average LP record, everytime you played it, it laid down extra "scratches" to the movie, and they tended to wear out fairly quick, compared to laserdiscs.

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 1183) on January 06, 2017, 03:18 PM:

The CED system was the wrong idea at the wrong time.

It was introduced 3 years after the superior LaserDisc, 4 years after VHS, and 5 years after ßetamax.

CED never overcame it's technical deficiencies, which was mainly that the micro grooves in the record were so sensitive to dust and defects that many discs skipped, or developed skipping problems.

LaserDisc did not have these problems, and was supported by multiple manufacturers and more movie studios. CED was a flawed product from the start, and by the time they worked out most of the technical kinks, it was too late. I remember looking at it in 1981 just before I bought my first LaserDisc player. It seemed crazy to buy something that required a needle in a groove, and a record so sensitive that it has to be encased in a special protective sleeve. Even finger prints on the record would cause them to skip.

Oh, and Osi, "LaserDisc" was a registered trademark belonging to Pioneer and Philips for their optical disc storage system. CED stood for Capacitance Electronic Disc, a totally different technology.

I do remember that the first stereo home video release of It's A Mad, Mad, Mad World was on CED (pan & scan). It was almost a decade until it was released in stereo on LaserDisc.

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on January 07, 2017, 11:44 AM:

The funny thing is that I still have around 200 laserdiscs lying about, and I don't think that I've watched but one or two in years. Unless it's a very rare title, they go for pennies these days, if that.

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