A Revolutionary System

[samurainoir]

[Earth 2 Chris]

I totally missed out on these, so imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon video discs of Star Trek: TMP and Superman: The Movie at a yard sale. I bought them, even though I had no way of playing them. Still have them. For a quarter...why not?

Chris

[Mikey]

Back in the day I had a Trek disc containing The Changeling and Space Seed (The inspiration for The Motion Picture and Wrath of Khan)

Quality was better than VHS

[Gorn Captain]

These are great for wall decoration...

[Earth 2 Chris]

Interesting that RCA used Trek to advertise their new technology. RCA owned NBC, which aired Star Trek, so they used Trek to advertise color TVs a decade earlier, in the 60s.



Chris

[Hedji]

Just awesome. There's a record store near me that sells tons of these.

[TrekStar]

Interesting that RCA used Trek to advertise their new technology. RCA owned NBC, which aired Star Trek, so they used Trek to advertise color TVs a decade earlier, in the 60s.



Chris

They did the same thing even earlier with the television show Bonanza.

[cjefferys]

We had one of these before a VCR. A very flawed format, after a few views, the discs would start skipping (as they had physical contact with a needle as opposed to a laserdisc read by a laser). We would rent discs and some would skip like crazy. My dad ended up trading it in for a VCR, a wise decision!

[drquest]

We had one too. Didn't really have the skipping issue, but you had to flip the disc over to the other side to watch the other half of the movie.

[darkmonkeygod]

I've still got Swamp Thing is this format. No player, of course but I dig having it.

[VintageJoe70]

We had one of these prior to our first vcr...in fact we still had it and my mom's discs up until 5 or 6 years ago...I know we had Friday the 13th on a disc I can't remember the overs we had..

[publiusr]

I wonder what a modern laser disk but with blu-ray tech could give you…new analog?

[Wee67]

We had one of these before a VCR. A very flawed format, after a few views, the discs would start skipping (as they had physical contact with a needle as opposed to a laserdisc read by a laser). We would rent discs and some would skip like crazy. My dad ended up trading it in for a VCR, a wise decision!

WAIT, WHAT?!? I just assumed this was a laserdisc! I had to go back and do more than skim the ad. How did a needle transmit video? Was the quality really bad?

[Makernaut]

WAIT, WHAT?!? I just assumed this was a laserdisc! I had to go back and do more than skim the ad. How did a needle transmit video? Was the quality really bad?

...undulations in the groove under the stylus directly controls the capacitance between the stylus and the conductive carbon-loaded PVC disc. This varying capacitance in turn alters the frequency of a resonant circuit, producing an FM electrical signal, which is then decoded into video and audio signals by the player's electronics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capaci...lectronic_Disc

Seems it took about 17 years to develop the technology into a product and by the time it hit the market, VHS was ready to be "the standard" for home video....for a lot of reasons. (way more to it than that, but that's the short version)

[Wee67]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capaci...lectronic_Disc

Seems it took about 17 years to develop the technology into a product and by the time it hit the market, VHS was ready to be "the standard" for home video....for a lot of reasons. (way more to it than that, but that's the short version)

Thanks. I assumed it worked similarly to a vinyl audio record, also translating into video signals, but it's hard to imagine an acceptable signal.

Or it was an update on this technology-