[ofibrvev]

Could have kept going...

The CED offers one hour of VHS quality per side that rapidly degenerates. I own a sizeable collection of them, and while sorta neat, it’s also sorta terrible.

The vinyl offers quality superior to most consumer tape equipment rivaled only by 11 ips reel to reel. CED had no quality advantages, decays rapidly and is non recordable. It was a non-starter.

The fact is that CED was in the works since the 50s when it may have had a short successful life, but RCA couldn’t get off their ass. In fact CED was the last consumer product ever released by RCA. (The RCA of today is just a badge on various crap after being divested by Thomson Consumer Electronics)

Also even though CED uses a stylus, the similarities end there. You can literally run your nail in a phono groove and hear the sound. It is a literal imprint of the sound wave. Video cannot be encoded in such a straightforward manner, NTSC and PAL are not trivially. Also the CED is not vibrating the stylus. Rather the stylus sits on ridges and the signal is depth encoded (therefore varying the capacitance, hence the name). It is much closer to a crappy laser disc in operation (which also encodes in analog.. not digital)

[dbcurtis]

An old boss of mine worked on that beast! From the sounds of it, it barely worked in the lab. He told a story of getting so frustrated one day that he literally shoved his ‘scope off the back of the bench in frustration and walked out for the day. In his opintion, it is a good thing that it is dead and buried.

[ofibrvev]

I have dismantled the players. Truly a marvel of electromechanical design. So many hand soldered and assembled parts. It is incredible they made it work mass produced. Too bad it was 20 years too late.