Anyone Remember CED? (1 Viewer)

[Geoffrey_A]

I have a CED player and a couple of titles. I like the discs for their display alue, they have some really interesting art on them. I especially like the art on Planet of the Apes, which is just bizzare. When I first saw the Ape on it I instantly thought "Man, that looks just like Paul Williams" not realizing that he actually appeared in the apes series in Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Another interesting note, CED featured a different version of Disney's The Black Hole than the standard VHS and LD release. On both VHS and LD, the image was squeezed for some reason, the CED is not, and also includes the theatrical overture. Neat eh?

 

[Jesse Skeen]

On the back covers of the earlier titles, they describe literally the ENTIRE movie- Citizen Kane even tells the ending!

 

[PaulBigelow]

I was wondering when the subject of JVC's VHD was going to appear.

How about the LD Hi-Vision in Japan? HD home video for the intrepid few.

 

[Mark Bendiksen]

Yeah, I had totally forgotten about that until you mentioned it! I had the CED of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and it summarized the entire story, including the ending where Chief, well...you know. I better not give it away here and be guilty of the same offense, but you get the idea.

 

[Al (alweho)]

If I am right, you had Leonard Maltin to thank for that. The writing of those decriptions was just one of the many things he was doing when he was first starting out.

 

[jazel]

discovision is still around and I work next door to the main headquarters in Irvine!

 

[Jesse Skeen]

They credited the writers of the "jacket essays" on most of them, Leonard Maltin did do a few. I'm not sure who did the initial 1981 releases though; those were the ones that had a complete spoiler-filled summary of the movie.

 

[Bob Graham]

It just occured to me that we are almost at the 20th anniversary of RCA's announcement that it was killing the format. I believe it was made on April 1, 1984 (I remember hoping that it was an April Fool's joke, but alas, no.)

I agree with Geoffrey, I have kept many discs for their display value. I still have two players, but I havent used them in ages.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

RCA just announced today that they are reviving the CED format, and it will include a new DIGITAL video and audio capability read by a stylus!!

 

[Jeff_HR]

April Fools!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[RobertR]

My feeling at the time was one of strong relief. I had been rooting for laserdisc all along, because of the elegance of a laser read system.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

RCA's response to laserdisc during development was "Our goal is to put a simple, easily-servicable player into the homes and keep the space-age technology in the factory!"

 

[Andy Goldstein]

"needle-vision" heh heh.

 

[LarryH]

Yep - I was there, too. I've still got a bunch of the disks lying around, and I actually got one of my two players fixed and up and running a couple of years ago. That reminded me of the flashing horizontal lines and skipping inherent on the stylus system.

As I recall, laserdisks were coming out about the same time. I naturally bought one of those, too. At the time, laserdisks were plagued by crosstalk problems which cause a moving vertical waterfall effect on any disks that weren't perfectly flat. At least CED didn't have that problem. Pioneer eventually developed a gimbel mounted laser that compensated for most warps.

I think there are a number of CED titles that never made it to laser (or DVD, as yet.)

 

[Josh Simpson]

Does anyone have a pic of a player or the movies since some of us have never seen them?