RCA Selectavision CED player and 72 movies! Woohoo!

[pac.attack76]

Built November 1983. Came with 72 movies all for $200. Great movies like Star Wars, Star Trek, Twilight Zone The Movie, War of the Worlds, Tron, Starman, James Bond, Wargames and others. next time I'm on here, I'll have the model number and a full list of the movies. Pretty good haul i figured.

[zenith2134]

Awesome. I've had LaserDisc, Betamax, VHS, SVHS, and U-Matic but never CED. 72 movies is a superb start. Anyone know how many lines of rez this format offered? Been a while since I read up on c.e.d. .
Being built in '83, a era-correct RCA TV set would be a sweet set-up. I had an '83 CTC-121 which would've been perfect. It had composite inputs on channel 91,92. Hell, even my '83 CTC-117 with Channelock tuning would be cool with an old CED player.
Also, Twilight Zone the movie is a favorite of mine. I collect 'obscure' b-movies from the 80s.

[ChrisW6ATV]

I don't think they ever published resolution numbers for CED. Most people have said it is/was about equal to VHS, which would be 240 lines.

[pac.attack76]

Yeah, only about 240. Some have said that it may be better than vhs but i guess it just depends on who you are. I never thought about it but i do have an RCA XL100 console from 84 that would probably pair up well. That would be cool.

[zenith2134]

It's funny, how much the source material can vary aside from resolution alone. On youtube for instance, some 240(p) videos can look just awful while others can be surprisingly good. Same for a format like VHS.. there have been examples where the production crew really pushed the limits of the format, yielding pleasing results. On the other hand, many tapes in my VHS collection look lackluster.

[old_tv_nut]

The CED signal put the color subcarrier down at a lower frequency than NTSC, but still mixed with the luminance. It would have caused a terrible coarse crawling dot pattern in the luminance, and terrible cross color in the chrominance, but all that was removed by comb filtering. You could occasionally see the effects of the comb filter on structures like bridges, where vertical wires were visible but diagonal wires would disappear.

[zenith2134]

Hi old tv nut ,
Would the additional y/c filtering applied on later sets, from the '90s or '00s, be additive or deleterious whilst viewing CED source material on a player with comb filter? I'm not sure whether or not it would cancel out.

[pac.attack76]

I remember using a 6 head vhs player and some quality vhs movies looked and sounded almost as good as dvd.

[Eric H]

My brief memories of seeing CED are that it may have looked slightly better than VHS on average but it had artifacts such as snivets in the image and was prone to skipping.

Laser Disc was the gold standard for home video back then and remained so until DVD came along but it never really took off with the general public, probably because it was rather expensive.

VHS did one thing very well and that was when the came out with Hi-Fi sound, it was a terrific Audio format!

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by zenith2134

Hi old tv nut ,
Would the additional y/c filtering applied on later sets, from the '90s or '00s, be additive or deleterious whilst viewing CED source material on a player with comb filter? I'm not sure whether or not it would cancel out.

Most TVs old or new would be transparent to the effects of the CED filtering, I think; that is, the CED already filtered out anything that would be affected by the TV set. The 240-line resolution tells that story, just as with VHS.

[egrand]

Originally Posted by Eric H

VHS did one thing very well and that was when the came out with Hi-Fi sound, it was a terrific Audio format!

We had a local radio station that started staying on the air for 24hrs a day and used VHS tapes for their overnight programming. They said it was a cheap and easy way to go automated. The tapes held 6 hours of stuff and in stereo.

[Sandy G]

I had an RCA CED player. I thought it was as good as my VHS machine, I kinda liked the "Soft" pictures it gave. Biggest problem I had w/the damthing was the "Skipping"... Even with a brand-new, out of the cellophane movie, it was subject to that. Sometimes you could "Jostle" it by hitting the FF/Rew button, sometimes you'd have to FF WAY past the offending piece of lint, fuzz whatever it was. And then, abut a MONTH or so after I got it, RCA stopped production of the damthings...

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by ChrisW6ATV

Most people have said it is/was about equal to VHS, which would be 240 lines.

I used to work for RCA at the Smirnoff Labs back in the CED days, and we knew the resolution was almost 3MHz, vs VHS was about 2MHz. So CED would be about 300 lines. Which means CED was somewhat sharper.

The color subcarrier on the discs was around 1.5MHz, and the players used a 5.11 MHz crystal to upconvert it to the standard 3.58MHz NTSC color subcarrier. There was a phased lock loop sort of circuit to vary the 5.11 MHz oscillator to compensate for wow and flutter of the disc turntable to keep the output a consistent 3.58MHz. The error signal I think was also used to push or pull the needle in a direction parallel to the grooves in the neighborhood, as a way to counteract the wow and flutter. The players used a comb filter set to the 1.5MHz subcarrier freq to separate it from the luma signal. Otherwise, a notch filter would wipe out all the sharpness of the video, making it worse than VHS.

Biggest problem I had w/the damthing was the "Skipping"... Even with a brand-new, out of the cellophane movie, it was subject to that.

That was because of impurities in the plastic used to make the discs. They never did solve it.

[old_tv_nut]

Wa2wise, thanks for digging up those numbers on bandwidth. For vertical edges/lines, the resolution would be similar to the capability of a notch filter (non-comb-filter) TV set.

Regarding the needle pull/push, I think it firstly improved the horizontal timing stability; and secondly reduced the color phase/frequency error, but not enough to make a signal suitable for the narrow color loop in a TV. The final color carrier correction had to come from a fast burst-referenced PLL on the 5.11 MHz, similar to that in a VHS machine except for the particular frequency used, right?

[pac.attack76]

Great info here. I watched about 5 movies on this thing yesterday and they did seem somewhat improved over vhs. I think today, I'm gonna set it up with my 84 RCA console.