The Format Wars in retrospect.

[kalee20]

Yes. Ease of producing in quantity is an undoubted plus point for discs in the format wars.

Technically, the cylinder would seem to be potentially better. Not only the defined pitch to the helix, allowing a driven pickup by a leadscrew, and the absence of angular error with the swivelling pickup arm almost always used with analog discs, but also the constant linear velocity for the cylinder's groove from beginning to end.

A discs quality does degrade from start to finish. As far as I know, it wasn't until the advent of the CD that an increase in speed for when reading from the middle of the disc, became an option.

[wd40addict]

Variable speed was attempted in the 1920s:

https://www.gramophonemuseum.com/world.html

Wow was an issue and allegedly most of the discs issued were brass bands because they minimised it's audibility...

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by vidjoman

Flat 78rpm discs are easy to press but a cylinder is hard to copy. No wonder the discs were popular because of the lower price.

Cylinders were moulded for the most part, the trick being to have a material which shrunk away from the mould enough to allow its withdrawal. Undoubtedly, though, the mass market found discs much more attractive, not least for breadth of repertoire.

[Panrock]

Originally Posted by Viewmaster

Edison cylinders came in two sizes, The standard one we all know and a Concert disc. This was about 4 inches in diameter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwwvqrOVCKU

An honourable mention here for Viewmaster's own pioneering Video Recorder using wax cylinders!

http://www.retinascope.co.uk/nbtv.html

Steve

[G6Tanuki]

There was also the early seventies TED TelDec disc system developed in Germany by Telefunken.

And Baird in the inter-War years demonstrated Phonovision, a low resolution system that allowed a flat record type disc to store (barely recognisable) video.

[kalee20]

Originally Posted by Ted Kendall

Cylinders were moulded for the most part, the trick being to have a material which shrunk away from the mould enough to allow its withdrawal. Undoubtedly, though, the mass market found discs much more attractive, not least for breadth of repertoire.

I can see that - though surely that would be the unrecorded, blank, cylinder - moulding the grooves would be nigh impossible and putting audio on them would be a separate operation? (Though it could have been done en masse, just not as easily as pressing discs!)

Originally Posted by Panrock;171302
An honourable mention here for [I

Viewmaster's [/I] own pioneering Video Recorder using wax cylinders!

http://www.retinascope.co.uk/nbtv.html

Steve

Now that is wacky! I love it!

[George Cooper]

Interesting thread.

Re VHS versus Beta, there were quite a few factors in play that allowed VHS to become king, however I always thought that the rental market made all the difference. Thorn EMI owned DER, Radio Rentals and others, and to the best of my knowledge only rented VHS machines, mainly because they sold them under the name Ferguson. Granada rentals rented Hitachi VHS machines and only Visionhire rented the Video 2000 system.

I recall seeing Philips demonstrate the Videodisc as far back as 1974/75, can't recall which exactly but this was in a university and they were looking for the interactive educational market. I did hear, though I don't know if it is true that Philips did not release the Videodisc in the mid 70's because market research people told them that there was no market for people watching pre recorded programmes or films in their own homes, hence the too late to market launch when the Video cassette rental shops started appearing up everywhere.

The Philips N1500 and N1700 were never rented by any major outlet that I am aware off.

Little tale about the N1500, I recall I was required to work late on the day of the 1978 Football World Cup final, so I brought home a N1500 from work, showed the wife how to get it to record and change tapes so I could watch it later. After working late I called into the pub on my way home and all my mates were talking about the game, and I mentioned that I had not seen it yet but would watch it when I got home, This of course brought astonished gasps from them, “you can do that”, so I told them the how and of course a group of them came home with me, not to see the game, but the machine. They were truly amazed to see me play back the game, and I explained that since the tapes only last an hour I had my wife change the tape at half time, wow they said, a women can work it as well, then the passing comment that put a damper on this chat, I hope she changed it again for extra time, Eh, dam, I had not thought of that..............

[Richard_FM]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

There was also the early seventies TED TelDec disc system developed in Germany by Telefunken.

And Baird in the inter-War years demonstrated Phonovision, a low resolution system that allowed a flat record type disc to store (barely recognisable) video.

TED was unusual that it used flexible discs, I did wonder if a solid one would have worked better with this format.

I'm not sure if Baird actually developed a machine to play back the Phonovision discs, but they were soon rendered obsolete by an increase in lines.

Years ago I saw a program where someone had managed to use a computer to read one of the discs.

[dave cox]

Is this the final iteration of incompatible shiny disk ?
Bluray, but not as I know it

dc

[emeritus]

I seem to remember that Polaroid did briefly sell an instant 8mm movie system, Polavision.

[kalee20]

Originally Posted by Richard_FM

I'm not sure if Baird actually developed a machine to play back the Phonovision discs, but they were soon rendered obsolete by an increase in lines.

Years ago I saw a program where someone had managed to use a computer to read one of the discs.

Baird did experiment with his Phonovision system, though I don't believe it hit the market. I recall seeing a few discs at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford.

But - there was also a remarkable instance of someone using a home disc recorder to record a few minutes of off-air TV back in the 1930's... and even more remarkably, those discs survived, unplayed, forgotten, till the mid-1990's when the 30-line video was recovered and viewed.

It's getting a bit OT because there were no competing formats at all - Baird was on his own - though I guess it could lead to a discussion about home disc recording, magnetic wire recording, tape recording, and magnetic disc recording which all existed!

[TonyDuell]

Originally Posted by emeritus

I seem to remember that Polaroid did briefly sell an instant 8mm movie system, Polavision.

They did, I have a couple of the cameras in my collection.

It used a similar process to the Polaroid 35mm still slide film. The Polarvision film was super8 gauge in special cartridges. After filming, you put the cartridge in the viewer unit which burst a pod of alkali (I assume) in the film cartridge and ran the film through to develop it. A couple of minutes later you could watch it. I am told the film would be ruined if the developing process was interrupted, e.g. by mains failure.

It was not a success, probably because portable video systems were available and camcorders were clearly coming soon. These had the great advantage of being much cheaper to use as you could erase and re-use the tape.

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by kalee20

...moulding the grooves would be nigh impossible and putting audio on them would be a separate operation?

It was not only possible, but done. The depth of the groove was necessarily small compared with the diameter of the cylinder, so material shrinkage provided the necessary clearance. Mass duplication was never done by Edison, although initially saleable stock was made by mass recording, with the artists performing in front of a battery of machines, and Pathe used pantographic duplication extensively in the production of masters for their various issue formats.

Edison's later Blue Amberol cylinders consisted of a celluloid outer shrunk onto a Plaster of Paris core, and were proudly advertised as "Gold Moulded" for good measure.

[Gulliver]

Baird did experiment with Phonovision as early as 1927. But resonance in his system meant that his attempts to playback the images were only partially successful. One of his staff at the time said that on playback, people's faces looked more like cabbages.

However in the 1980s a chap called Donald McLean managed to solve the playback problems and retrieve moving images from all surviving Phonovision discs. There was one Baird standard disc sold in Selfridges, "Major Radiovision" which consisted of a series of still images presumably to test or calibrate one's televisor. It is very rare but it was the first home video disc ever circa 1935.

In the 1990s some home recorded 1930s Baird 30-line TV discs were discovered and Mr. McLean also restored the images from them. One of the earliest BBC Digital broadcasts was an elderly Betty Bolton watching herself sing as recorded on BBC television in the 1930s.

Anyway a bit off topic but for those interested, try www.tvdawn.com


Polavision...the Polaroid cine film...nearly sunk the company and resulted in Edwin Land being ousted. An amazing technical achievement that it could even work at all....but it had severe limitations and was launched just as the video age was beginning to really take off. It was obvious that a new cine film format wasn't the way to go. But so much money and effort had been sunk into it over a period of years they had little choice but to launch and hope for the best.

Polavision had other issues in that while the film was the same dimensions as super 8, the Polaroid process meant that the images were low contrast and could only be viewed on the Polavision system which consisted of a cumbersome machine with a 12 inch screen. The film itself remained in cartridges and could not be run in ordinary super 8 projectors, nor could the Polavision viewer be used to show super 8 film. Even with the dedicated viewer, the films looked rather drab and ran for shorter run times than super 8.

Curiously a few NOS films survive and occasionally someone tries one. Even 40+ years after the last one was produced, they can be shot in the Polavision camera and run through a viewer to obtain recognisable images. A great technical feat but rather pointless, as it turned out. Had it appeared 10 years earlier, it might have gained some market presence.

[emeritus]

Thanks for the Polavision info. I remember reading about it in a photo magazine, but only remembered that Polaroid envisaged it would be useful for sports coaches, who could for example film a golfer and show him what he needed to do to improve his technique. I think I saw them being sold at a discount in Dixons.

[Viewmaster]

Originally Posted by Panrock

An honourable mention here for Viewmaster's own pioneering Video Recorder using wax cylinders!

http://www.retinascope.co.uk/nbtv.html

Steve

Gee, thanks for the plug Steve. We are all pioneers in our own way. You most certainly are in many fields.

[Richard_FM]

Originally Posted by TonyDuell

They did, I have a couple of the cameras in my collection.

It used a similar process to the Polaroid 35mm still slide film. The Polarvision film was super8 gauge in special cartridges. After filming, you put the cartridge in the viewer unit which burst a pod of alkali (I assume) in the film cartridge and ran the film through to develop it. A couple of minutes later you could watch it. I am told the film would be ruined if the developing process was interrupted, e.g. by mains failure.

It was not a success, probably because portable video systems were available and camcorders were clearly coming soon. These had the great advantage of being much cheaper to use as you could erase and re-use the tape.

I heard the cameras were made by a company with a good reputation for making cine cameras, but were left in tricky position by the system not catching on. The now defunct site Dusty Gizmos had a good writeup on this format.

[wd40addict]

Polarvision also help sink Eumig as they were the suppliers of the viewer. There is a story that at the launch a reporter asked a Polaroid engineer whether they were worried about video, his answer was "what's that?".

The colour system used was, I believe, addative like Dufaycolour hence the subdued picture brightness.

[knobtwiddler]

Going back to DAT for a second, the copyright protection system is known as SCMS (it should've been called "PITA"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System

There were a few firms making standalone 'SCMS Strippers'. The one mentioned earlier in thread from Elektor is discussed here (note that you can now download the code to make one - have fun!): https://zedstarr.com/2021/02/07/minidisc-bit-stripper-the-elektor-scms-killer/

Imagine my dismay in 1993, when I'd budgeted for a Tascam DA30 (a pro model that I'd used in studios before saving up for my own), only to be told that Tascam had fitted SCMS to it only months before... I was charged £50 to remove it (no doubt a quick internal snip was needed...kerching!).

I seem to recall that some of the domestic DAT machines had a fixed SR @ 48KHz, thus obviating the issue of digital clones of CDs. The DA30 has extremely good A-D / D-A and I'd put money on no one being able to A/B/X the converters against modern 192 / 24-bit ones when listening to a 2-track master (of course, audiophools would throw up so many non-sequiturs, I would never get the A/B/X test..).

Regarding the earlier comment about DAT being more of a semi-pro / consumer format: I can't agree with that. Studios that I knew were first on the waiting list when DAT was announced. They couldn't have been keener (hence the stories of Studer A80s being offloaded for pennies in the 90s, which did actually happen). The BBC were early adopters of the DTC-1000 and communicated with Sony's R+D team according to reports:

My recollection of DAT's launch is that a delegation of senior staff from Sony visited the BBC in 1986 to demonstrate their DTC-1000 DAT

edit - the link above is well worth visiting if you haven't seen it before. Lots of audio formats are discussed.

[Richardgr]

Interesting recollections!

A format not mentioned is CX for LPs, developed by CBS and used for their recordings in the early 70's. Went on to be used for video disc noise suppression.
CBS CX noise reduction.

I did not see any mention of one annoyance with DVDs, regions. I worked in another country at the turn of the millennium, with friends who travelled to America and the Far East, so having a DVD player that could only be changed to another region 3 times was a limitation.

Also going to mention my pet gripe, and part of the unpopularity of CDs: flimsy, easily scratched jewel cases, that are no fun to operate one handed. They were meant to be an evolution from a cassette case, but are rubbish, IMO. There are superior ways to hold a CD using card and SACD type holders, so just profiteering.