Home Geek Geek Features It Belongs in a Museum: Digging Up the CED

It Belongs in a Museum: Digging Up the CED

June 23, 2021

“Hey Stephen, have you ever heard of something called a videodisc?”, a friend asks me with an eyebrow raised and a slight grin on his face. Thinking he was just talking about LaserDisc, a popular ’80s film format, I told him I had. “No, man. This isn’t LaserDisc. This is different. This is Videodisc, or I think it’s sometimes called the CED,” he replies back quickly. My eyes squint, my brain starts checking its boxes. How could I be such a movie geek and have never heard of this? I shake my head and a huge smile breaches across his face. “Well, I think I have something you’ll be interested in,” and thus followed my first experience with the CED.

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The CED, or Capacitance Electronic Disc, was an analog video disc system created by RCA. Where the LaserDisc read films optically with a laser beam, the CED used a specific needle and cartridge combination to read high-density grooves imprinted into the film’s disc, extremely similar to a vinyl record player system. The idea was first conceived in 1964, and had the technology actually been released around then, the CED would have possibly been groundbreaking for the video-at-home industry. However, production was slowed and stalled for 17 years, due to a number of reasons, including conflicts with RCA management on rollout, technical failures with the product itself, and just all-around poor planning. Finding the correct material to make the discs proved to be one of the biggest challenges. The discs were originally made very similar to records, with a vinyl substrate, nickel, and silicone layers. Due to the wear and tear of the needle, and even instant deterioration at the time of manufacturing from simple engineer handling, RCA had to completely change the product, crafting it out of PVC and carbon.

It wasn’t until March 1981, when RCA was finally able to release the first CED player and about 50 films, the first title being Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown. Unfortunately for RCA, VHS had better storage capabilities (more on this later), and LaserDisc had better sound and picture. The CED was essentially rendered obsolete on arrival due to the massive amount of time it spent in development hell. RCA had predicted that 200,000 players would be sold in it’s first year, but came up less than halfway to goal. A few other companies like Sanyo and Toshiba caught on, and tried their own hand at the CED, but within the first two years, sales were consistently dropping. RCA even tried promotional strategies of giving their films away and significantly lowering player costs, to no avail. Their idea that CED players would be in 50% of homes was a pipe dream, at best.

After substantial losses on the CED, RCA decided to announce the discontinuing just barely three years after its release in April 1984. Although they stopped all production on the players, they still continued to produce Videodiscs in hopes to make up money lost, and announced to consumers that films would still be released. Knowing the CED was now dead technology, customers all but stopped purchasing the films, losing RCA an estimated $600 million in the two years between discontinuing and stoppage of film sales. The last film released was The Jewel of the Nile in 1986 before RCA put the kibosh on the CED once and for all.

So, now that you know the history behind the CED, it’s time to jump into my experience. In an act of upmost kindness and as a donation to my obsession with weird film stuff, my friend gifted me a rare, perfectly working RCA CED player and about 100 films of my choosing from his massive collection in storage. I grabbed some heavy hitters. Star Wars, Escape from New York, Serpico, The Muppet Movie and Dracula were just some of the classics I snagged.

Here’s a couple fun facts about Videodiscs: Conversely to LaserDisc, CEDs do not come in a nicely printed jacket or book. The 12-inch discs are trapped within a hard plastic caddy, similar to the more-solid computer floppy disks of the early-mid ’90s. Like those disks, you cannot take the actual round disc out of the caddy without breaking the case. I will say that one of the most unique and fun things about the CEDs is the art on the cases. Although the cases are square, most of the art is formatted in a circular shape, making it unique to the size of the disc itself. Also, CEDs and the player itself weigh a ton. You can carry about eight of them at a time without throwing out your back. It took about six trips with two people to move 100 films from one place to another.

So, I’ve made it home with my brand-new-to-me, dead-as-hell technology, and after sifting through all my new treasures, I decided on my first watch. In celebration of it’s 40-year-anniversary, I chose Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not only one of my favorite films of all time, but it was also released just two months after the CED, making it one of the very first video systems the film was released on.

I popped in Raiders, and yes, I mean popped it in. The player has a load/eject switch on it, and you essentially cram the entire plastic case into the front, and player pulls the disc out of the case. When ejecting the film, you flip the switch to eject, and cram the case back in to pull the disc out. The discs only hold about an hour on each side, and there is a hard cutoff, sometimes in the middle of the scene. The film will cut to black, and this is when you eject the film, flip it over, and insert it back in. You’ll want to make sure the correct side of the case is used for the front and back, because there is no way to match up the disc with the correct case side unless you put it in the player and flip the case. This can get even more confusing with longer films, as some of them have three separate discs, with film on each side, totaling six different sides for a total of one movie. Super intuitive…

Raiders looked about how I expected it to. The sound seemed like it was better than a VHS, but the video was about the same. Full-screen format is definitely what these films were made to watch on. You can choose widescreen, but it will stretch the picture a quite a bit. You also have the options for a fast-rewind and a fast-fast-forward, a function that really wasn’t regularly available until DVD players. There were a few moments where the disc skipped and sped up, almost like when a record skips. The scene where Indy is running through the fields from the Hovitos Tribe continuously skipped, making it looks like it should have had the Benny Hill theme playing over it. Either way, Indy wins the day, faces were melted, and nostalgic fun was had.

As someone who loves film and physical media, getting the chance to fully experience a dead piece of film technology is so incredibly fun and important to me. All in the span of a couple weeks, I was introduced to something I had never even heard of, learned a ton about it, and watched one of my favorite films in one of the first ways it was made to be seen at home. I encourage anyone reading this to take the time to do the same in any way you can. Buy that $10 VCR and $2 VHS of your favorite movie. Listen to the differences between albums on records, tapes, and 8-tracks. Go back and play the original versions of games that they’ve remade three times. There’s just something special and captivating about absorbing something the way it was meant to be experienced, for the time it was meant to be experienced in. I’m thankful for having the chance to feel that and have others in my life that are willing to share it with me. I hope this article can do that for you.