A friend recently gave me an old RCA VideoDisc player and a bunch of discs. This is a format that originated in 1981 and died in 1986. The format was not very popular. However, there are quite a few technological innovations to be found here. The discs are stored in protective caddies, and the player pulls them out and puts them back in. The result is that no dust or fingerprints ever gets on the discs. An automatic stylus playhead is used, which allows index skip, fast forward, and fast rewind. The FF and RW doesn't suffer from the video quality loss that VHS rewind/fastforward does. The image quality is about on par with a VHS tape. Not as good as laserdisc by far. The player needed some dusting to get it going, and one of the buttons was stuck, but it is now in perfect working condition. It's very quiet when operating and in general the video quality is quite good, considering that the newest disc made is 22 years old. I don't think that 22-year-old VHS tapes would hold up quite so well. Obviously, we've opened up the player here so you can see the inner workings. When it's closed, it protects the disc from dust and other contaminants. Music: Pictures at an Exhibition, which was the intro music for the system Movie: Bladerunner

• published: 01 Sep 2008
• views: 23295
• author: AvWuff