Advantages of CEDs
CED players, from an early point in their life, appealed to a lower-income market more than VHS, Betamax, and Laserdisc. The video quality (approximately 3 MHz of luma bandwidth for CED) was comparable to a VHS-SP or Betamax-II video, but sub-par compared to Laserdisc (about 5 MHz of luma bandwidth).
CED players were intended to be "low-cost". Because they have fewer precision parts than a VCR, a CED player cost, at most, about half as much to manufacture. The discs themselves could be inexpensively duplicated, stamped out on slightly-modified audio gramophone record presses.
Like VCRs, CED videodisc players had features like rapid forward/reverse and visual search forward/reverse. They also had a pause feature, though it blanked the screen rather than displaying a still image; many players featured a 'page mode' during which the current block of four successive frames would be repeatedly displayed.
Since CEDs were a disc-based system, they did not require rewinding. Early discs were generally monaural, but later discs included stereo sound. (Monaural CED disks were packaged in white protective caddies while stereo disks were packaged in blue protective caddies.) Other discs could be switched between two separate mono audio tracks, providing features such as bilingual audio capability.
Like the Laserdisc and DVD, some CEDs feature random access and that users can quickly move to certain parts of the movie. Each side of a CED disc could be split into up to 63 "chapters", or bands. Two late RCA players (the SJT400 and SKT400) could access these bands in any given order. Unlike its laser-based counterparts, the chapters in a CED are based on minutes of the film, not scenes.
Novelty discs and CED-based games were produced whereby accessing the chapters in a specified order would string together a different story each time. However, only a few were produced before the halt of CED player manufacturing.
Read more about this topic: Capacitance Electronic Disc
Famous quotes containing the words advantages of and/or advantages:
“When the manipulations of childhood are a little larceny, they may grow and change with the child into qualities useful and admire in the grown-up world. When they are the futile struggle for love and concern and protection, they may become the warped and ruthless machinations of adults who seek in the advantages of power what they could never win as children.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“[T]here is no Part of the World where Servants have those Privileges and Advantages as in England: They have no where else such plentiful Diet, large Wages, or indulgent Liberty: There is no place wherein they labour less, and yet where they are so little respectful, more wasteful, more negligent, or where they so frequently change their Masters.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)