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Zenith sold them (rebranded from whom, I don't recall) for a short time, and later there were a few in the building that employees could check out. I remember watching "Barbarella." I don't remember any "blue rain of static," and there probably was skipping, but I just don't recall.
When RCA demonstrated the system to potential business partners, they pointed out the comb filtering effects, believing that they were benigh enough for a consumer product. They had one movie clip involving a suspension bridge - the vertical wires were visible, but the diagonal ones faded out.
The CED player senses the minute capacitance changes due to pits in the groove by making the stylus and disc part of a microwave oscillator - the frequency is modulated, and an FM detectior can then get a strong signal out of such small changes. The oscillator has to work in the same "garbage" frequency band as early microwave ovens (915 MHz) so as not to cause interference to other devices. there was some concern that microwave ovens might cause interference in the player, but i don't know if that was sufficiently suppressed by sheilding.
The CED sound, being FM , was better than VHS linear track, but not better than VHS FM.
Colors can appear "washed out" for two reasons:
1) much poorer film-to-video transfer than today
2) low chroma bandwidth (reduces saturation on small objects and prevents well defined color contrast on vertical edges) (this problem is not too different from VHS)
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