Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater HD DVD

The big discs like the vinyl ones are the LD ( Laser Discs ), I didn't even buy one of those because I thought DVD's were less of a trouble to keep since they were smaller. The first time I watched a LD was back in 1998, the movies was Waterworld. At the time I was pretty much blown out by the quality of video and sound, but still I refused to buy them since there were the DVD's already. Why would I buy something that bigger if I could get them as a small DVD, that's just what I thought at the time. I won't call it a war but LD tried to be a DVD competitor, at least here in Japan, but it just flunked!

What was the other large movie format that wasn't LaserDisc? Oh, I just looked it up. CED. I just remember my dad got one of those players for just about nothing since the format was dead, and we watched one of the Star Wars movies on it at my grandparents' place.

LD was around loooong before DVD. As I recall, they were actually invented before CDs, although I don't know that they were commercialized.

We had them here in Japan competing with DVD's at the time. Dvd's suddenly became a success here in Japan getting the big market share in 1996 already if I am not mistaken.

I can remember my buddies dad having a laser-disc player back when we were in about grade 6 or 7... Which would have been about 1992 or so.

The large, vinyl record disc player I'm talking about would have been out in 1980, because that was when we lived in Colorado, and that was the 1st and last time I ever saw one. It was really, REALLY bad about skipping if we got up and were bouncing around the room. I don't think it had any laser technology incorporated into it, I think its the player CV mentioned.

All I really remember about it was the really cool art on the record discs themselves. I don't remember what all movies they had, but I know one of them was a Disney movie because I remember seeing the picture on the record disc and being blown away by how cool that was. And I remember (keep in mind I was only 9 at the time) wondering how the heck they were able to extract a moving picture from that still picture on the disc itself onto the TV using a record needle (which was what I imagined was inside the player) of all things.

I was clueless... but in absolute awe of the magic!

They were CEDs (Capacitance Electronic Disc), I almost bought a player and some videos when I was at living in Florida for school.

Wikipedia has way more info about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CED_player

Yup, that be it alright. Wow, it was read by a phonograph needle.... how did I get that right?

Lol! Never heard of that before! I am gonna check that out on Wikipedia!

I'm only speculating here since I only watched a handfull of movies on the one my friend had, and don't remember squat about its features... but I wonder if, much like a record player, you simply put the videodisc in the player, & it played from beginning to end? No fast forward, no rewind, no pause or skip or search... just play & stop?

I'm assuming this because I never saw a record player with those capabilities. And if they'd found a way to do it with the videodisc player, you would have thought that technology would have trickled down to record players as well.

Although I suppose I never saw every record player ever made either.