RCA 1984 Video Systems CED Videodisc 

We had Star Wars on CED and the quality was superior to VHS. At least based on my memory.

The presenter was the late John Stephenson, best known for voicing several characters in Hanna-Barbera animated series and films, including Mr. Slate in _The Flintstones,_ Fancy-Fancy in _Top Cat,_ the original Dr. Benton Quest in _Jonny Quest,_ zookeeper Mr. Peevely in _Help! It's the Hair Bear Bunch!_ and Mr. Dingwell in the TV movie _Yogi's First Christmas._ He also did a great Jimmy Durante impression, which got him the role of Doggie Daddy in several H-B films and series, including the aforementioned _Yogi's First Christmas._

@@antster1983 thanks, I can't even remember watching this video or even why I would be watching it hah!

@@antster1983 Huh, I figured he must’ve been an RCA executive who’d been a great salesman. Didn’t realize he was a classic voice actor hired for this job. He sure sold these products like he believed in them.

He represents exactly how I learned "Americans speaks in commercials" worked back in the 80s (I'm German, so don't take it as correct, it's just how I see it 🙂). Very nice presentation, easy to understand, well filmed and cut.

+lexfacitregem Like people weren't going to do it any fucking way.

Like, why the fuck did you add a recording feature to a VCR in the first place if it's illegal. Gente estupida!

West McAllister Reminds me of the old days, when blank cassettes were marketed as being great for copying CDs....

The SCOTUS overturned that.

You are absolutely correct! I applaud your intellect!! I believe you're referring to "Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios". I knew that my one year of law school would pay off!!! I miss you, Sandra Day O'Connor!!!!! Ginsburg is just a wannabe!!!!!

Just like Sony and Betamax.

Yep, just a logo stamped on cheap throwaway Chinese electronics now. And look what's happened to their network NBC.

Sadly, RCA did it to themselves, especially after David Sarnoff left the company. With regard to CED's failures, it can be attributed to two things. 1. The format came out too late. 2. VHS and how RCA's huge support of that format wound up undermining their videodisc business.

I have a JVC color TV (54 cm), which I bought about 15 years ago. It never was serviced and still have the perfect brightness (excellent tube). I'm not going to change it in the near future, may be it will serve me 20 years. The only real disadvantage is it has only RCA input, so for viewing videos from USB-stick I've bought special Asus multimedia... don't know the word for that thing, like a small box with USB and SD-card input and a bunch of outputs. BTW it switches channels much faster then modern TVs (has no video enhancing programmes I think).

CED's weren't capable of stereo until later when the blue caddies came out

+Andy Pandy do u need more

+teddy tice I'm still collecting. I always want more. = )

As in you only owned the three compatible components that used the remote?

@@armike669 I had a Dimensia TV, a VCR, and the RCA CED player, too.

It's actually "We'll open your eyes."

Don't know what they were thinking when they made that model- fast-forward but no reverse? What happens if you go too far? I've heard the missing buttons are actually still under the panel but they left them off the front as a cost savings.

You forgot to mention Laserdisc came out in 1978! RCA should have pulled the plug then!

I think about it every time I finish jerking off.

***** My joke was a lot more clever. Plus I didn't have to be insulting.

And he was right. Think about it.

Alexander Ryan I collect demos like this. I know I’m not the only one

I have one of these in my CED collection.

Both of which are basically now dead.

LOL

Actually, they kept releasing titles for a couple of years after they stopped manufacturing players. The last commercially released CED title was "The Jewel in the Nile".

+Tommaso Petrella Dunno if I'd agree. This one definitely looks to have been well-kept over the years, but the video quality is hardly anything over VHS, certainly not good enough to sacrifice the ability to record TV with blank cassettes.

+MegaBojan1993 I dunno if I'd agree with that... They certainly werent what we have today, but looking dead-center, they were actually not that bad. Problem is, as those TVs were projection screens, any other angle was ass.

***** I knew a guy once who had 32-36 inch CRT TV back in 1998 and when I saw the picture on that TV it was very blurry, so yeah. The picture on those TV's must've been pretty bad.

MegaBojan1993 Well, even by 98 we were getting clearer video (S-video and early progressive scan), so hooking to composite might not have been the best idea. Still, I imagine it would have been pretty dope for '84. Really shows you how fast tech has moved.

***** My friend didn't used S-video on his gigantic TV. He used plain old RF coaxial cable from a cheap antenna to watch his TV-programs :) My poor country didn't had cable TV back in 1998.

+MegaBojan1993 Ouch, I can see the issue. Composite is kinda iffy after 30".

"The last RCA product I bought was in 1988. It was the last VCR they made in the US." RCA never made a VCR in the US. For that matter, they never made a VCR at all. The first VHS VCR released in the US (in 1977) had RCA's name on it, but it was made in Japan by Matsushita (Panasonic), which was the majority stockholder of JVC, which invented VHS. No VCR was ever made in the US by any company that I know of. VCRs were made by Japanese companies, and later, at least one Korean company (Goldstar, AKA: LG). Philips, a Dutch company, designed a couple of VCR systems, but I don't know if they manufactured any of them in their own country or not.

ChiliConQueso my cats would love those

+CHICKEN SALAD You joke, but for the time, it was probably a VERY elegant remote. Granted, you were stuck with compatible RCA equipment, but you didn't have to fuck around with codes like early universal remotes.

Really does, outside the fancy transitions and 80s movies, everything about this presentation could be from like 1973.

@@jaekoff5050 It was supposed to come out in 1973.

+paulisdead Yep- and in 1985 we got a 26" TV and thought that was REALLY big! Now I've got a 60" LCD and that seems too small, my next one will be at least 80".

+eyeh8nbc Personally, I think 40" is pushing it. I use a 32". These modern TVs are built with HD, FHD or even UHD in mind. To display old SD video signals from DVDs, the picture needs to be upscaled. The same holds true for old analog SD video signals, such as VHS or even old video game console with composite or S-video outputs. Not only do these analog signals need to be upscaled, they first need to be converted to a digital signal. Not all modern TVs do a good job of displaying the converted analog signals. And when upscaling SD to HD - even if the source is a DVD - the pixels are going to be magnified. And the bigger your screen, the more noticeable your SD pixels will be. By comparison, a PAL SD video signal (576i or 576p) is 720*576 pixels. HD (720p) is 1280*720pixels, FHD (1080i or 1080p) is 1920*1080pixels, and UHD is 3840*2160pixels.

+paulisdead If you wanted a screen much bigger than that in '84, you needed to pretty much go rear or front projection. Not sure if even 32" or 36" CRTs were available at that time but they were in the 90s though.

+ZYC Mitsubishi broke the size barrier in 1986, first going to 31 inches, then 35 and finally 40 inches in 1994- I bought the 40-inch CRT in 1996, still have it in my parents' garage after replacing it with an HD LCD.

+eyeh8nbc Geez, a 40-inch? That must have been all kinds of heavy!

I read on another video that it's John Stephenson (1923-2015), an actor famous for providing the voices of Mr. Slate in The Flintstones, Luke and Blubber Bear in Wacky Races, and the original voice of Dr. Benton Quest in Jonny Quest.

strictlysega nope, and very few players did

+ZYC The format didn't kill them. Holding back on it for more than a decade did. Thing was ready to go LONG before it was released, but after Sarnoff died, the new CEO had cold feet. If they had gone ahead early on, it would have found a market well before VCR. Standard tale of corporate hubris.

Political infighting and continuous changes in upper leadership added to the delay in product development. We all know the story. The CED was too little, too late by the time it came out in '81. By that point, the laser disc had been out for a few years and was technically superior in almost every way...yet even that format struggled to compete with tape. The time-limited clunky cartridge non-recordable disc format was doomed from the beginning. Even if they had it released by their original target date of 1977, it would have still failed. It is well understood that any disc -based format at the time would struggle to compete against video tape and the CED was the final nail in RCA's coffin. Yes, the format pretty much killed them as RCA was never fully able to recover from the losses the CED program had incurred. The reason why the DVD was successful upon its release in the late 90s was because the DVD was able to produce an image quality that was vastly superior to anything else on the market at the time and it was an astonishing difference that 'wowed' the consumer. Plus it offered hours of continuos playback and later on, recording time. But even prior to its record capabilities, the product had mass appeal. Such was not the case with the CED. There was nothing that wowed the consumer. Even by 1981 standards, the CED system seemed dated, ugly and clunky. Add no record ability or any other useful features...fate sealed.

ZYC True enough. Even early on there were DVD video recorders, if you wanted to spend the money on them, and even if not, you could get your home tapes transferred. CED offered nothing of the sort.

***** Exactly...recordable DVDs were right around the corner anyways and at the time the S-VHS/VHS format was able to fill the time shifting needs until PVRs were prevalent. Consumers wanted DVDs. They collected TV shows as well as movies on them People went out of their way to replace their libraries with DVDs. CED offered the consumer no such incentive to switch. Thanks for the friendly reply. Cheers.

ZYC Yeah, the more I think about it, the less potential I see in the CED. Didn't have the visual clarity of LD (which came out in 78 as DiscoVision) while requiring the same amount of storage space, so the videophiles were out, and it didn't over the versatility of a VHS VCR. Only thing it had over the competition was the cheap media, and that was counteracted by the $500 player cost on debut. Valiant effort, to be sure, but it was a product that didn't have a market at that point.

+Digital1crystal screen paint Yeah, maybe your right but it will takes a longer time gap to show the differences because we aren't changing that much today (closer to limits).

Illumation Streambutler +Illumation Streambutler Not really trust me i'm a tech-head :) fact i was around when reel to reel player was the source of entertainment even in my gaming collection i still have pong the console. Was into building and designing pc's back when the net was 14.4 net-speed. In school before your class room demonstrations were displayed on a projector way before the betamax and the VCR there was reel to reel player in school as for these tv lol i had a wooden floor model tv lol and not the one with the push button digital display more like the dial Clickers and the rabbit ear antennas with a 19" screen to match way before the 25" so trust me when you seen what i seen when it come to the technology from then and now and you seen what the world been working on for the future you would definitely agree with me :) on that note you have a good one

+Nathan The thing that I think will keep VR from replacing the TV is the lack of social appeal. You can't really watch VR with your boys, not the way you can on the couch with a TV.

Mainly to shoot home videos with a camera. This was BEFORE camcorders (cameras with the VCR built into them) existed.

you dont get it because you never used one

Cool story bro.