13-11-2023, 05:57 PM
I've seen only two also. One in a shop in late 1970s on demo and one part of an interactive training system with a PC in a factory in late 1990s. An RCA "CED" based system would never have lasted that long.
But though development of Laserdisc might have started in the 1960s, it wasn't available till 1978 worldwide. It may have been earlier than the Wikipedia date of 1978 in USA in UK/Europe. Certainly some Philips, Grundig and other European developments were in UK/Europe (and PAL before NTSC) before USA or Japan. With USA developed products (Apple II, IBM PC etc) Europe could even be up to a year later.
I also had early Video CDs, including one CD-i format version of a Star Trek TOS movie. With in a few years of 1994 (when White Book VCDs came out) the home PC encoding on Windows was better than the original releases. IMO all the commercial VCDs are poorer overall than VHS and much poorer than S-VHS due to to encoding artefacts. Our "home made" VCD were better, somewhere between VHS and S-VHS. Colour smearing and noise could be a problem on VHS as was lack of horizontal resolution. The VCD is only 352×288 25p but for slower moving content (no visible artefacts) obviously early commercial CD-i and VCD had better colour registration and lower noise. VHS resolution limitation is horizontal frequency response. Often quoted is 250 lines horizontal, PAL VHS is similar to about 335×576 pixels luminance and 40×576 chrominance. Hence VCD is slightly better horizontally, much better on colour, but on static or slow moving scenes, though there are no artefacts it has half the vertical resolution (no interlace on recording) for PAL or NTSC. Our first DVD player still goes and plays the actual Video CDs. The CD-i title (or titles?) only played on a Windows 3.11 PC with a video editing card that had a PAL TV out, to the TV. I can't remember if we tried that/those titles later on XP or Linux or later DVD players.
I also have a Kodak supplied Portfolio CD (CD Audio tracks synced to an interactive slide show using PhotoCD images). It plays on my Philips PhotoCD/Audio CD player (must be over 25 yo, but goes well) and on a free Kodak app for Windows 3.x. The high cost of authoring Portfolio CDs certainly helped to kill it. Similarly archival and high quality PhotoCD was replaced by Picture CD, using jpegs on CDROM format (cheap aluminium backed CDRs) that was too low resolution and too compressed because of Kodak Bureau costs for PhotoCD.
But Film APS and PhotoCD finally killed off by digital cameras.
But though development of Laserdisc might have started in the 1960s, it wasn't available till 1978 worldwide. It may have been earlier than the Wikipedia date of 1978 in USA in UK/Europe. Certainly some Philips, Grundig and other European developments were in UK/Europe (and PAL before NTSC) before USA or Japan. With USA developed products (Apple II, IBM PC etc) Europe could even be up to a year later.
I also had early Video CDs, including one CD-i format version of a Star Trek TOS movie. With in a few years of 1994 (when White Book VCDs came out) the home PC encoding on Windows was better than the original releases. IMO all the commercial VCDs are poorer overall than VHS and much poorer than S-VHS due to to encoding artefacts. Our "home made" VCD were better, somewhere between VHS and S-VHS. Colour smearing and noise could be a problem on VHS as was lack of horizontal resolution. The VCD is only 352×288 25p but for slower moving content (no visible artefacts) obviously early commercial CD-i and VCD had better colour registration and lower noise. VHS resolution limitation is horizontal frequency response. Often quoted is 250 lines horizontal, PAL VHS is similar to about 335×576 pixels luminance and 40×576 chrominance. Hence VCD is slightly better horizontally, much better on colour, but on static or slow moving scenes, though there are no artefacts it has half the vertical resolution (no interlace on recording) for PAL or NTSC. Our first DVD player still goes and plays the actual Video CDs. The CD-i title (or titles?) only played on a Windows 3.11 PC with a video editing card that had a PAL TV out, to the TV. I can't remember if we tried that/those titles later on XP or Linux or later DVD players.
I also have a Kodak supplied Portfolio CD (CD Audio tracks synced to an interactive slide show using PhotoCD images). It plays on my Philips PhotoCD/Audio CD player (must be over 25 yo, but goes well) and on a free Kodak app for Windows 3.x. The high cost of authoring Portfolio CDs certainly helped to kill it. Similarly archival and high quality PhotoCD was replaced by Picture CD, using jpegs on CDROM format (cheap aluminium backed CDRs) that was too low resolution and too compressed because of Kodak Bureau costs for PhotoCD.
But Film APS and PhotoCD finally killed off by digital cameras.
