CED Performance-is it Supposed to Be This Bad?

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by andy

It's surprising, but CED came out after Laserdisk, Beta, and VHS. It's true that development started in the 60's, but they didn't have a commercial product until about 1981. I've heard CED blamed for putting RCA out of business. They spent color TV kind of money on a product that was obsolete before it was released.

RCA dropped about $570 million on this thing. It is possible that some shareholders asked GE and others to take RCA over, so as to get rid if the fools in the boardroom who thought CED would fly.

Oh, I suppose, if RCA was able to hit the streets with this thing back around say 1972 or so, then it would have been a hit. But the critical technology, like how to make the needle, and how to cut the grooves in the disk, obviously wasn't ready then.

The CED system used an FM modulation scheme like that used in videotape to encode the video into the modulation of the grooves. Biggest annoying problem was that any impurities in or on the disc would make for skipping. The machine had a scheme to advance the needle to take care of backwards skips, but no similar scheme to move the needle back after a forward skip, to maintain the cadence of the movie being played. I knew the guys who developed this firmware, and they said that they planned to do this, but the big bosses froze everything so they could ship product. This was at the old RCA Lab in Princeton NJ.

When it didn't skip, CED did make a somewhat better video image than VHS tape (3Mhz vs 2Mhz).


In a sense, DVD disks are equivalent to CED discs, in that (back in DVD's early days) neither was recordable. You had to buy prerecorded movies. So why did DVD succeed in the marketplace, and CED bomb? The fact that DVD worked well would be a secondary consideration here.

I remember hearing that various RCA dealers electronics stores were unhappy about having to devote salesfloor space to CED. One said "I want to kiss this thing a quick goodbye!".