The DiscLord Video disc player

[Sonik Wiz]

About a hundred years ago when AOL was the place to be, I "met" a guy on one of the Dolby forums by the the name of Stereoboy. He lived in New Mexico but surprisingly moved to the Kansas City area, maybe a 40 min drive from my place. Eventually he showed up on QQ & contributed so much. By this time he was using the name Disclord. As I had the chance to get to know him I learned he was a hard core dedicated Laserdisc fan and also a casual fan of Dr. Who. So I guess the math was Laserdisc + Time Lord = Disclord.

Just the other day I ran across a video disc player by good 'ol National & the model was: DiscLord!

This was brand new new me, probably because me thinks none were ever exported from Japan. In a quirk of fact that I'm sure Ty would appreciate, it was not Laserdisc but.... VHD. Something quite different, in fact different from the capacitave disc system by RCA Selectavision. Techmoan will be glad to tell ya all about it.

 

[Wunlow]

I had a number of discussions with Ty Chamberlain (aka: StereoBoy, aka: Disclord) about his very special VHD player. Decades before the 3-D bluray format, VHD used the field-sequential 3-D process to offer 3-D movies in 3-D but these would default to a 2-D version if you had a standard 2-D VHD player. But.. if you owned a 3D VHD player like the DiscLord model, special LCD 3D glasses and select 3D VHD discs, once could experience true 3-D. And JVC ensured there was a decent selection of 3-D titles, including House of Wax, Dial M for Murder, Jaws 3-D, Friday III in 3-D, Spacehunter, etc etc..

 

[Sonik Wiz]

I had a number of discussions with Ty Chamberlain (aka: StereoBoy, aka: Disclord) about his very special VHD player. Decades before the 3-D bluray format, VHD used the field-sequential 3-D process to offer 3-D movies in 3-D but these would default to a 2-D version if you had a standard 2-D VHD player. But.. if you owned a 3D VHD player like the DiscLord model, special LCD 3D glasses and select 3D VHD discs, once could experience true 3-D. And JVC ensured there was a decent selection of 3-D titles, including House of Wax, Dial M for Murder, Jaws 3-D, Friday III in 3-D, Spacehunter, etc etc..

Thanks for the come back @Wunlow . The first time I visited Ty & Tony they were quick to share 3D video via disc. Since LD was also an early adopter of 3D, (and HD), I just assumed it was Laserdisc. Maybe it was VHD! That is a really cool possibility. Alas I have ocular strabmisus so I have really bad depth perception, 3D stereo movies or pics are simply lost on me. But the 3D system with LCD glasses alternated sequential fileds into each eye & what I saw was a very flickery picture. Tiltilting my head left/right gave me some delightful Moire patterns so I still had a good time.

 

[Wunlow]

Yep, that field-sequential 3-D flicker was a staplemark. Along with a few other unique quirks, the field-sequential 3-D system was limited to analog NTSC's fixed 60hz scanning rate which translated into a flickery 30hz per eye. The recent active 3DTV flatpanels and projectors still use very similar LCD glasses, but have the advantage of running at 120hz or 144hz so the flicker is eliminated. Plus the resolution of 3-D bluray is a literal magnitude better than VHD.

Still though, what 3D VHD had accomplished in the 1980's was incredible. Ty had managed to acquire a good number of those ultra rare 3D VHD titles which even decades later were going for insane prices on ebay.