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Even Worse, RCA's stylus based SelectaVision Video Discs


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Talk about a TRON WRECK!
I remember reading about them, think they were based on capacitive pick-up by the stylus flying just over the disc.
 
Quite a story. MTV BEFORE MTV. A very progressive Navy Ship. I remember 16mm well......in high school, we were lulled to sleep by those 16mm scratched prints with deplorable audio. When I got my first 8mm Sound Projector, the studios used to put out 10 minute clips of major motion pictures and charge $15 for the privilege. Horrible prints and mono sound......but at the time, I was in heaven. Amazon now blows out UHD4K discs for under $10 with astounding resolution and dolby ATMOS soundtracks so if one wants to quibble how everything was SO cheap in the 'ole days ..... think again.


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My grandfather gave my father his film editing machine (may have been super 8 or the previous hone format) we used to get all the Gerry Anderson Thunderbirds (puppets, you could see the strings!) short reels we had and play them backwards. So the explosion, then the car/boat/plane all came back together - as kids we loved that! :LOL:
 
I remember reading about them, think they were based on capacitive pick-up by the stylus flying just over the disc.

Nay, Dunc. The discs themselves were enclosed in 'caddies' and slathered with 'gunk' and were actually read by a sylus [needle] reading those discs....the problem being, the stylus itself got 'mucked by the gunk' causing the picture to become distorted akin to a turntable stylus becoming infested with dirty record debris.

It was an idiotic system ..... and nowhere as sophisticated as Pioneer's laser read discs [no stylus contact with the actual disc].

Pioneer's early problem, however, was substandard discs pressed in the U.S. by a company called DISCOVISION and once Pioneer started pressing their discs in Japan, the system finally gained recognition as the superior format.
 
Jim, love your recantation of the parts business foibles.

A story of the hi-fi business: We put the "high" in hi-fi. Although we never smoked in the store, our cars were rolling car-fi salons. Often, only the joints were rolling, parked at the back of our lot.

We had just opened our brand new store. It was directly across the street from our old store. We became the prototype. New types of signs. No longer hand-written and now often hanging from the ceiling with monofilament. The hanging signs would set off our silent burglar alarm, causing a squad car to respond.

"Ed the Head" was one of our service techs. He would constantly be adding more amps to his car-fi. 11 PM and we're sitting in Ed's Camaro blowing a few bowls. Both of us had our own places. We could have gone there, EXCEPT we each lived about 20 miles from our store in opposite directions.

PD pulls up and I'm freaking out. Ed gets out of the car and proclaims: "that damn burglar alarm keeps going off!" "Yeah, we're gonna have to start charging you for these false alarms." Cops drove off and we went back to smoky Rock & Roll...
 
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:eek:So the stylus ran in a groove! Can't have been that much bandwidth, must have made VHS look hi-def 🤣

Disc failure was rampant via RCA's Selectavision and that gunk was actually a lubricant to reduce wear on the stylus which had to be replaced after 1000 hours of play. A dreadful approach and an abject failure.

Ironically, the 5" DVD had a much better picture and much longer playing times than either RCA's CED or Pioneer's laserdisc systems.
 
I have a Shadows of Knight record I got that way.

Not if the period of the frame rate is less than the duration of persistence of vision.

I found a case where that is not true. It depends on the timing of the event recorded, not the persistence of vision.

On the TV show "Mythbusters" they solved the problem of the "flying rods" people were seeing on video screens and on tapes they made.

They got two video recorders, one at (then) standard 60 fields 30 frames per second rate and one at 1000 frames per second. Where the standard recorder recorded a strange rodlike object with multiple wings, the 1000 frame/s recorder saw a moth that flew faster than the scanning rate. The rodlike object was an alias of the moth.
 
Thinking back, that parts shop I worked at actually rented Selectavision discs for a while. Dunno how well that worked for them, since I was no longer employed there by that time (1981?). That was the last job I lost before I quit drinking, heh.
 
I remember reading about them, think they were based on capacitive pick-up by the stylus flying just over the disc.

It was.

I still buy DVDs because I want my discs to play on everything I have. The studios and manufacturers want me to replace my players every few years.

It is time to have one standard and stick to it.
 
Selectavision was one of the few wacky formats I did not get involved in, but I would hate to see a total of how many dollars I spent on LaserDiscs. Oh My! I can still remember dropping $125 on certain Criterion's and other collectors sets, rationalizing that I'd be "good to go" when I retired because I'd have this great movie library to watch forever.

Now I have 1000 or so discs I pretty much have to get off my ass and take to the dump! :(
 
Why were prerecorded VHS tapes so expensive? The movie studios knew 90-some percent of the sales would be to video stores, not to individuals. It was the studios trying to get a piece of the rental income.

RCA's CED video discs did use a grooved capacitance system. The groove had no modulations, unlike LP's. The groove was simply a track to guide the stylus. Discs were made of PVC w/carbon added to make them conductive. Many of the discs skipped. That was caused by either a manufacturing defect, or dust particles in grroves. RCA's service techs told me that these skips happened regardless of which machine the disc was played in.

I bought into this format only because of music titles that weren't available on LD, Beta or VHS at that point: Grateful Dead Movie, Let it Be, Gimme Shelter, Jimmy Cliff's the Harder they Come, Last Waltz and others. Naturally, I rebought them later on DVD & Blu-Ray.

System was a dog. Picture quality not as good as LD, but usually better than VHS, even at SP. Many of the titles were only released on other formats years later. So, I'm glad I bought this dog. I got many hours of enjoyment from those rare music titles.

"Red and white blue-suede shoes. I'm Uncle Sam, how do you do?"...
 
In the old days before DAT came out, I had a Sony PCM-601 hooked to a Mitsubishi VHS with Hi-Fi tracks....I would use the the digital tracks to record mixes during sessions, but on my off time I tried to record Quad using all 4 tracks...but never could get to work because of the delay between PCM and Hi-fi tracks even though I had a good quality delay it never seemed to work like I wanted....It was still fun trying to make that new tech work saving the old tech (kinda like I'm trying to do today) :)
 
Selectavision was one of the few wacky formats I did not get involved in, but I would hate to see a total of how many dollars I spent on LaserDiscs. Oh My! I can still remember dropping $125 on certain Criterion's and other collectors sets, rationalizing that I'd be "good to go" when I retired because I'd have this great movie library to watch forever.

Now I have 1000 or so discs I pretty much have to get off my ass and take to the dump! :(
WOW indeed!
I have maybe 50>60 LD's only. But I've always been very selective about media purchases in any format. I give it the ten years test. If I think it's a title I'll be enjoying ten years from now it's worth buying. At my age I should probably make it an eight year test.

I do have a perfectly functioning Pioneer DVL-700 and quite a few LD's that never made it to DVD. or BR. So I find it still acceptable to watch with out hurting my eyes. All my discs even going back to the days of CX encoding except for about three still played fine. Just this last week I watched The Wizard of Speed and Time that I purchased in '89, 31 years ago! Played like new.

Don't dump the LD's. Isn't that what Ebay was invented for? To keep people from having to go to the dump?
 
Selectavision was one of the few wacky formats I did not get involved in, but I would hate to see a total of how many dollars I spent on LaserDiscs. Oh My! I can still remember dropping $125 on certain Criterion's and other collectors sets, rationalizing that I'd be "good to go" when I retired because I'd have this great movie library to watch forever.

Now I have 1000 or so discs I pretty much have to get off my ass and take to the dump! :(

DITTO, Jon. Even invested in Pioneer's Elite model disc player and Theta Digitals behemoth which at a further expense of about $1500 upgraded the model to play Dolby Digital 5.1......a BIG deal at the time. Even have the Japanese Box set of the first three Star War Films.

There was a store in Greenwich, Connecticut called AUD/VID which sold the players and actually rented out Laserdiscs and applied the rental fee should you want to purchase the disc. But the harm was done ..... couldn't actually calculate how many thousands of dollars I lavished on the format. Way over $30K, that's for sure!

And the REAL shame, UHD4K discs represent the pinnacle of home video excellence and the studios, IMO, have lost interest in manufacturing them. They trickle out in short supply and methinks the studios would rather license their films to pay per view/streaming channels than actually be bothered producing them for sale.


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Theta's Laserdisc player with 'nifty' separate CD drawer!

And who could forget this:



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I actually remember getting records like this on the back of a cereal box, but I don't think I had the Monkees one. Strange promotion but they did work. As I recall they didn't sound very good but hey!, they were free. (Except you had to eat the shitty cereal) One of my far back memories of being a real little kid was getting my Mom to buy cereal not because I liked it, but because of what the prize inside was. The late '50s was a time of bizarre marketing. I can remember laundry detergent boxes with drinking glasses in them (real glass! Collect them all!), and even stores that would give you a dish with every visit (again, collect them all) These are VERY way-back memories. Damned if I can't remember last week, but I remember this shit. (I guess it won't be long for me to forget this website's url!)
Ha! as a 57 year old, I remember these records, but I loved the cereal, too. The records really played and were good! I also remember being excited to get yo-yo’s from cereal. All this fun stuff and Sea Monkeys, too! What could be better! Except the clackerS😜😜
 
DITTO, John. Even invested in Pioneer's Elite model disc player and Theta Digitals behemoth which at a further expense of about $1500 upgraded the model to play Dolby Digital 5.1......a BIG deal at the time. Even have the Japanese Box set of the first three Star War Films.

There was a store in Greenwich, Connecticut called AUD/VID which sold the players and actually rented out Laserdiscs and applied the rental fee should you want to purchase the disc. But the harm was done ..... couldn't actually calculate how many thousands of dollars I lavished on the format. Way over $30K, that's for sure!

And the REAL shame, UHD4K discs represent the pinnacle of home video excellence and the studios, IMO, have lost interest in manufacturing them. They trickle out in short supply and methinks the studios would rather license their films to pay per view/streaming channels than actually be bothered producing them for sale.


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Theta's Laserdisc player with 'nifty' separate CD drawer!
Beautiful player. Still using it? I always wanted one of the MUSE LD players.

RE: store rental LD's. I had a store like that locally as well. Saturday mornings it was packed with people & by people I mean just guys, perusing the LD's looking for something to watch that night. Unlike most of them I would rent maybe 6>10 LD's a time & dub to S-VHS & watch later. No copy right protection at all! And the S Video was almost a match for LD. Good times.
 
Ralph, Nice Elite CLD-97! I think I had one of those myself at one point, and replaced it with this one. Here's a phone picture of my DVL-91 in my theater rack. The sensors are to allow me to use the remotes as these are behind the screen (facing away). It does DVD as well, but I haven't used that function in decades (literally).

DVL-91.jpg
 
Beautiful player. Still using it? I always wanted one of the MUSE LD players.

RE: store rental LD's. I had a store like that locally as well. Saturday mornings it was packed with people & by people I mean just guys, perusing the LD's looking for something to watch that night. Unlike most of them I would rent maybe 6>10 LD's a time & dub to S-VHS & watch later. No copy right protection at all! And the S Video was almost a match for LD. Good times.

No, Wiz, the Pioneer Elite conked out and the Theta Digital behemoth is likewise in 'cold storage.' A nice format for its time but sadly, exceeded in leaps and bounds by 2K/4K broadcasts and that 5" UHD 4K disc.

Wish I had invested the money I had spent on all those DEAD FORMATS ..... but then I suppose I wouldn't be where I am today if my LUST FOR AUDIO/VIDEO nirvana had been vanquished!
 
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