over the last few years we have had a blast checking out home movie formats
that never really took off and in order to do that I've ended up with quite the
collection of copies of Blade Runner but
my collection could never be complete without RCA's biggest flop of all time
this is a CED or capacitance electronic
disc selectiv Vision Video dis player and this is yes yet another copy of
Blade Runner for my collection but this time on CED video disc from
1983 and I got to say even as someone who's very pro- digital I can imagine
how cool and special it would feel browsing for movies like this seeing all
the artwork you know reading the large print synopsis on the back this feels
incredible imagine like Bell's record wall but now video discs up on the wall
and it's still a great movie but as cool
as it feels this is a terrible format to release it on and I can't wait to tell
you all about it got fired is now your fault the tools your company is using
belong to the museum our sponsor oou offers over 50 apps to help your
business run smoothly use the right tools for the job with o
do my favorite thing thing about these videos is that I review The Script we
talk about the major beats and the comparison points but they never show me
it until the shoot so I have never actually loaded one of these I assume
this is the handle and I just pretty much you've got to flick that into the
load and unload position it's chunky she is chunky now
you pop it in keep going keep go keep going oh it
detects I'm on side one yeah like a notch or something yeah it's got to take
the whole disc right so that's in that should be in and now pull it out oh
wait it's gone oh it actually right that
makes sense this is just a sleeve yeah it's just a caddy for the whole thing I
miss hearing and feeling like the physical K chunk as you like load a big
thing into a player that's great so cool
and you don't have to rewind them I guess we'll talk about pros and cons
later a bit but like how did VHS win by
being better we'll get to that yeah speaking of VHS that's what we're going
to be using as our first comparison Point against our CED disc our player's
pretty old so we've actually got to hit fast forward just a little
bit okay I'm not going to look at it yet
because before we do that I want to give you a little bit of history back in 1964
RCA or the radio Corporation of America decided to try their hand at bringing
movies into the homes of the masses and
what better way to do that affordably mind you than to copy the music industry
and use an easily stamped vinyl disc it
was a pretty good idea in theory but
what they thought would be easy ended up taking over 15 years to develop and
refine now we're going to talk more about how it works and why it took so
long later because right now I want to see what all the fuss was about
obviously it's not the most Apples to Apples comparison because rced is not
widescreen yeah and our TVs are completely different but for our
technology developed in the 60s yeah
it's pretty interesting at at the very
least I mean this is on a vinyl
record yeah in a really Layman's way to
put it yes it is a vinyl record it's got a whole lot more to it than that um it's
pretty impressive it is a piece of V it's carbon infused but
yeah it's super cool I'm just kind of amazed it works at all I know I know
it's absolutely astounding can we fit to screen yeah we can fit to screen it just
looks a little Sher when it does I know there's not much I think it's more
apples to apples though that way cuz VHS
had the advantage for a second there of being much smaller and therefore looking
quite a bit better but you can already see where this starts to fall apart
though I mean these are both really old copies and I was about to say you start
to see where VHS falls apart with the fringing we don't get fringing here yeah
but look at all the noise well yes like really weird noise too and on top of
that uh what also used to happen a lot is these would start to skip a whole
bunch as soon as they've been just used
a little bit so you might say they were vinyl records kind honestly
yes oh that is really annoying yeah and
it flick you yeah the noise just like comes in for a while when it works
though sure I think it actually looks a little better maybe a very small amount
dude the fringing the fringing on VHS looks poo
it does it do look at how much better something like that blue light in the
background with the bokeh it's got purple bokeh and it's got blue bokeh I
can't get over the noise man it's driving me crazy cuz it just like comes
in and out yes but we've got to evaluate it for how would have looked new well
this is pretty much it there's
like it's an old copy it's an old copy
fine it's a used copy it's a used player we've got to evaluate it for how it
might have looked when it was new I mean this player and disc are older than us
100% yeah so I think we should give it the benefit of the doubt and look at the
moments when it's not doing that the okay sure but the problem is a lot of
the times these wouldn't last in this
level of fidelity sure for very long
yeah because you're pulling it in and out all the time um they're not perfect
there it's so much data packed into such a tiny surface area that like a tiny
Speck of dust is going to just like introduce all this weird noise we're
seeing but it was developed in the 60 oh yeah I'm incredibly impressed what
they've accomplished is an astounding feat of Technology like absolutely
mindblowing the fact that we're getting video and no you see how it starts to go
though yeah and that was far from the only challenge that CED faced when it
launched it had a small catalog of only about 50 titles and each disc only got
about 60 Minutes of content per side so you would have to get up and flip the
disc over when you were in the middle of watching your movie just like laser disc
VHS on the other hand was typically around 2 hours per tape at maximum
quality and up to 4 hours at longplay
quality now that's a big problem because
these three formats competed in the Market at the same time with CED pretty
much being the worst of both worlds video quality about on par with VHS but
with the same disadvantage that laser disc suffered from and that being that
you couldn't use your player to record live television and view it later Bo
okay this is are you kidding me we're
never going to get it back on because of that oh my goodness it skips so much I
know oh dude that's how we got so far ahead they were both playing at the same
rate and don't forget that like these have been in caddies the whole time oh
my yes it's used but it's gotten to the state while being in a protective sheet
ridiculous and being loaded and unloaded from the player and that's it people
aren't taking them out like our Herald and mod copy that is like not very good
quality at all anymore it's super busted so then if it had come out first I would
kind of understand why they bothered to launch it but it didn't both laser dis
and VHS came out before CED so what
could possibly have been their competitive Advantage it was supposed to
be cheaper these originally launched at around $500 for the player alone that's
way cheaper than the early players for these yep and then discs were supposed
to be cheaper as well these were retailing for about $15 to $40 a movie
and they ended up with actually a pretty impressive library of around 1,700 films
or recordings which considering the three-year lifespan
it's pretty
good it's a pretty awful viewing experience though with the skips it's
really not great it is exactly as bad as
listening to a song with record skips yeah and here's the thing these are both
used they've both been played multiple times right this has been fine our VHS
yeah it's got some issues but like it's played normally this is constantly like
just fully skipping ahead it could also be our stylus maybe it's just worn out
it's probably not what RCA called video virus where it needs to be played
through once or twice before working because we've watched this part a few
times now and it's always busted so I can understand why it didn't take off
but while it might have been a massive failure in the market for good reason
the technology is really cool like to
the point where I'm not surprised it took them this long to develop you might
already be familiar with how a vinyl record works but if you're not to put it
very very simply a stylus gets dragged through wavy grooves that create
vibrations which are picked up by the cartridge and turned into an audio
signal well CED works by dragging a
stylus through wavy grooves as well but this time it's the depth of the vinyl
groove that matters and the stylus it doesn't vibrate instead the signal is
derived from the distance between the disc and the titanium electrode in the
stylus through their Mutual capacitance that would be the ability of two
adjacent conductors to store electric charge so it's a bit more complicated
than your hip friend's turntable and it
gets even better see most vinyl records that are playing audio spin at 33 and A3
RPM so just over 33 revolutions per minute to get a 60 HZ MTS video signal
rced player is spinning that disc at 450
RPM shockingly RCA scientists figured
all of this video capacitance stuff out way back in
1972 there was no competition
but at that time they were only able to store about 10 minutes of color footage
per side yikes the original multi-layer
discs also had issues and they needed time to be refined into what we have now
PVC AKA vinyl blended with carbon then
covered in a thin layer of lubricating silicone we actually have a regular old
record for reference and there are some key differences that are immediately
obvious it's way flimsier but the thing that really stands out to me is the
difference in the grooves see they're both the same 12-in size but for CED to
get the data density up everything everything had to be shrunk down by a
huge Factor so instead of hundreds of grooves per inch I'm talking over 9,000
grooves per inch 9,541 to be precise at this scale the
tracking force of the stylus had to be absolutely perfect instead of 2 G for a
vinyl record it had to be dialed to 065 G with pretty much zero room for
error long story short it took them years to get to this point and by its
launch in 1981 it was just too little
too late VHS landed on us Shores in 1977
and Laser disc came out a year after that now while tape had been too
expensive to compete back when it was getting cooked up it wasn't by this time
and renting movies on VHS was getting more common by the day in 1985 the first
Blockbuster Video rental store opened its doors in Dallas Texas with an
inventory of 8,000 VHS and 2,000 beta
Max tapes and just one year later RCA
gave up on CED tragic see stuff like that would
happen on VHS as well like you'd get some weirdness every now and then but
you would have to play that tape a lot or you would have had to like really run
it through the ringer like someone watch the same spot a lot of times ex yeah EX
yep exactly whereas this would happen you
know pretty quickly I think they claimed
that you'd get up to 500 watches I don't think I believe that even just popping
the top open looking at how fast this thing is ripping around 065 GS of force
yeah and while I'm probably never going to watch the fine selection of CED video
discs that came with our player they'll make a fine addition to my collection
speaking of which are you the one working on the ultimate Showdown oh yeah
oh that's going to be cool nine formats we're going to be watching Rambo first
Blood across nine CED laser disc DVD HD
DVD Blu-ray VHS beta Max dvhs dvhs
that's eight there one more there's one more I can't who will be crowned King of
the home movie formats and what will be the Winner's prize wa what Dennis how
much does lonus pay you not enough that's why I sto my side business with a
sponsor Odo you mean the Odo the all-in-one business solution that has
over 50 apps and you can sign up for a 15-day free trial right now oh my God
here's a tip of saying that line yes what do you even sell things that cost
me 0 what you know online we reveiew
over 100 products a year instead of sending them back to the brand I send
them to my customer let me show you here you are how many things do you have here
show him the oldo inventory app yes sir
roughly 69 of them nice W you got the 58
80 and the lambo how much money you making well you can't see all old do
sales app they have a full report oh that's a lot of money can I get a
discount yeah lus the potential is there
the potential's there and it's super cool and I love like loading it in and
unloading it that's great and the lack of fringing I would take this over VHS
all other things being equal and no rewind if it worked perfectly at all
times and came out 5 years earlier and came out a few years earlier and had a
better sele at launch honestly it might have been fine it just came out it's too
little too late if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out the one we did on
laser dis video this failed to catch on
but honestly I think deserved a better fate it was so far ahead of its time or
if you want to pick up more information on CED we're going to have some links to
other YouTubers who have done super in-depth videos on this technology we'll
have those down below but we'll actually have them this time yes he'll make sure
I will or I'll get fired no oh