Not Laser Disks? Video disks? (1 Viewer)

[John Watson]

I saw a small lot of movie disks for sale in a junk shop.

The titles were Pink Panther, and other musicals.

I am not sure what a Laser disk looks like, but understood it to be much like an LP, in a large sleeve, whereas these movies I saw were in a white plastic container, with no evident means of sliding a disk out. In fact I could not be sure there was a disk inside the thin plastic tray?

Can anyone tell me, re these actually LD's or some other format?

 

[Johnny G]

They're not LDs, they're EXTREMELY poor quality analogue video discs from the late 70s (I think), and get damaged easily, Video tape is better than these and they belong in the garbage.

(edit)
I forgot to mention, the magnetic disc is inside the case, you load the whole thing in the player.

 

[Michael St. Clair]

I'm no fan since they never had more than a handful of discs in OAR (five titles, literally), and since Laserdisc beat them by all benchmarks.

The discs are CED discs, and the players are RCA SelectaVision.

They did look a bit better than VHS, at least when the discs and the player were new.

They didn't sell because VHS was the same price and could record, and if you wanted the highest quality, laserdisc blew it away.

QED CED R.I.P.

 

[John Watson]

Ahh, those answers make sense guys, thanks.

I take it it was read a litle bit like a floppy disk?

So it was a proprietary format, as well.

I might pick one up as a wall graphic / museum of technology display.

 

[Kenny Foor]

These fascinating items are called ced or capacitance electronic discs. They were almost like a vinyl record in that they were played back with a stylus needle. You had to manually insert the plastic cover, called a caddy, into the player and than pull the empty caddy back out. But later players had a motor-assisted loading mechanism to do this automatically. They were invented and produced in the united states by RCA from 1981 to 1986. You can read more about them at www.cedmagic.com.

The only real way to damage the discs was to remove them from thier caddies and touch them or expose them to sunlight.
I owned several of them at one time and it was (and still is) my opinion that they were better than videotape.
But maybe it's the nostalgia talking.

 

[Rob Gardiner]

a.k.a. "NeedleVision"

 

[john mcfadden]

i bought Raiders of the lost ark on ced at goodwill for a dime ...

 

[Jesse Skeen]

Once I get a camera I need to post a picture of my 1200 CED collection