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Posted: |
May 13, 2017 - 3:37 AM
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By: |
Metryq
(Member)
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A CED player and a few discs passed through a TV studio I was working in back then. I can't recall how the package ended up in our hands, but we played with it for a while, both fascinated and appalled by the fact that it used a needle to play video. (But then the Fisher-Price PXL2000 used audio cassettes to record video.) I don't recall whether or not it looked better than VHS, but I always found the Betamax* vs. VHS arguments silly. Both tape formats had similar horizontal resolution specs—both of which paled in the light of U-matic and other formats to come. They were just stepping stones along the way. And markets can swing on a variety of factors that have nothing to do with technical superiority or inferiority. I collected Laserdiscs when they were in vogue, and the quality of titles varied depending on various steps in the mastering process. So it was often hard to get a handle of which home format was "better." (* Many people seem to confuse Betamax and Betacam. Sony continued to use the same transport mechanism and cassette design, even though other specs of the pro Betacam format improved performance.) Was VCD "better" than VHS? Again, irrelevant. This optical medium was popular in the east while VHS dominated the west. Each may have had advantages—price, convenience, durability, image quality, editing features? In retrospect, none of these formats lasted all that long, at least when compared to, say, LPs. (The current "resurgence" in LP is nothing more than a retro fad.) CED was an interesting technical footnote in the history of home video.
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