Welcome to part 5 of my SepTandy Spectacular 2. In the last post I took a look at the last game console sold by Radio Shack, The Tandy Memorex Video Information System, In this finale post for this years SepTandy Spectacular, We're going to switch from video games to video players take a look at Radio Shacks Realistic 16-301 CED Player.
Released in 1981, The Realistic 16-301 was a home video player that used the unique Capacitance Electronic Disc (or CED) disc. However it didn't end up selling very well due to the format it used and was discontinued a few years later.
The company behind the CED was the Radio Corporation of America (or RCA). A once major electronics company that was once one of the keys in the development of many common house hold technologies like Radio and Television.
They were founded in 1919 as a reorganization of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America (or American Marconi). In 1897, the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, Limited, was founded in London to promote the radio (then known as "wireless telegraphy") inventions of Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. In 1899, they expanded their reach to the US by founding American Marconi. However after World War I, Congress rejected the US Navy's original intentions to have peacetime control of the radio industry and instructed that the Navy return the stations it had taken control of to the original owners. Fearing that Marconi would take domination in international radio communications, they had made a plan with General Electric to buy all of the assets from Marconi and, along with the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (or AT&T), Westinghouse Electric, and bizarrely enough United Fruit, formed RCA.
Around that same time Commercial Manager David Sarnoff was trying to promote his own idea, a device he called the Radio Music Box, a potential application for the communications technology to be used in a household device that could allow someone to listen to music at home.
The problem was none of his superiors were interested in the idea. It wasn't until the next year in 1920 that his superiors decided to take a chance on the idea. The company allocated $2,000 for the development of a new radio receiver and various accessories and Sarnoff got his superiors onboard starting their own experimental broadcasts, soon forming the radio station WJZ as a joint venture between RCA and Westinghouse.
Sarnoff 's idea proved to be a success as Sales figures went from essentially $0 in 1920, to $358 million in 1924, the company's sales team went from just 14 people in 1921 to 200 offices across the country in 1922, and Sarnoff was promoted from Commercial Manager, to Vice President, to General Manager. By 1929, RCA was selling 75,000 radio sets per week and pulling in $30 million in profit annually.
In the 1930s they decided to diversify. After buying Victor Talking Machine in 1929 and working out a deal to buy AT&T’s various radio stations in 1930, RCA had formed the National Broadcasting Company (Or NBC). they also began manufacturing their own tubes and radio receivers, eventually leading them to be split from GE and Westinghouse to become their own company in 1931.
With RCA now operating independently, and with all of the various new facilities that Sarnoff had managed to acquire before they were formally broken off, they were ready to become the forerunners of the electronic age. The most important way they did this was forming RCA labs. with new research departments, RCA began making many innovations starting with the development in the Home Television set. With the production of Cathode Ray Tubes for radar displays being easily adapted to create television picture tubes and with immeasurable amounts of new electronics knowledge gained after World War II, RCA had Easily enjoyed a successor to the radio as well as owning NBC, originally in two divisions, red and blue, but legal action made them sell off the blue part and that would become The American Broadcasting Corporation (Or ABC).
The Development of the CED began in 1959 when William Webster, The head Laboratorian for RCA Labs, had formed a team with the Systems Research Laboratory, led by Thomas Stanley, to work out the limits of what could be done with integrated circuits. One of Stanley’s side projects was figuring out the potential of storing and retrieving information on a vinyl disc. This work led them to the capacitance concept, and laid the first foundations for the CED.
By 1964, RCA were looking for a successor to Color TV similar to how TV was the successor to radio. Their Idea for this was developing a device that would allow consumers to watch pre-recorded content on an ordinary black and white or color television set. There were 4 projects being developed to do this, One was simply a device that used standard magnetic tape, but most of RCA's engineers weren't keen on it remembering their failed attempts to develop a color video tape back in 1951, The second was A system called PhotoPix that was essentially a ViewMaster reel scaled up with smaller Photographs which would be read by a vidicon tube and turned into a television signal, the third was a system called Holopix that worked by storing holograms on a vinyl disc, that would be hit with a laser to create an image which would be read by a vidicon tube and turned into a television signal. (Yes, Seriously!), and the fourth and final was a system called DiscPix, which was based on Thomas Stanley's capacitance vinyl disc concept.
Development on PhotoPix (later named PhotoTape) and HoloPix (later named HoloTape) came to a halt in 1969 after failing to compete with CBS's EVR Video Tape, leading to DiscPix being the a better product to develop from Thomas Stanley's point of view. by 1972, the CED team had produced a disc capable of holding ten minutes of color video (a portion of the Get Smart episode "A Tale of Two Tails", re-titled "Lum Fong") and by February of 1973 RCA had a working prototype player to demonstrate.
But due to constantly shifting management and budding heads with different divisions lead to a slow development and the system kept getting delayed on its public release date but finally did come to market on March 22,1981 for $500 with each disc costing $15.
RCA had licensed the technology for other companies to manufacture their own players with most of them being variants on the Hitachi VIP1000, The Realistic being one of them.
The Realistic 16-301 was introduced in 1981 for $499.95 with a wired remote control included.
The player itself is quite basic. On the front is a time indicator neddle that goes along to let you know how far in the program you're in, 2 LED indicators for sides 1 and 2 (More on that in a sec), buttons for Eject (Labled Return), search backwards fast or slow (which is essentially Rewind) , Play and Pause, and search forwards fast or slow (which is essentially Fast Forward), and the slot for inserting the discs themselves.
On the back is RF input and output a channel selector switch, composite video out, mono RCA audio out, the plug for the remote control, the power cord, and the model information stickers. Yes there's only mono out for sound. a year after the release of CED, in 1982, RCA introduced models with stereo sound and with wireless remote controls, and a year after in 1983, they introduced models with Random Access (Or essentially Chapter Select).
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Speaking of the remote, its also quite basic. just copying the functions from the front of the player and nothing else.
As for the discs themselves, they look like this.
This is Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan (Quite obviously). Now you're probably thinking "Hey Wait a minute, this isn't a disc!", but it is. what your seeing here is just the protective caddy for the disc. the disc itself is held inside of it. The disc itself looks very much like a standard vinyl record and for the most part, it is. It's a thick piece of PVC mixed with carbon and with a shiny lubricant on the surface to reduce wear on the stylus.
Yes there is a stylus involved, and you need to replace it every so often or else your disc could skip. something else that can cause the disc to skip is getting it dirty, which is why it comes in a protective caddy. If it does get dirty it can cause the disc to become unplayable and unfortunately you cant clean them. However, a good disc can be played 500 times, which is a decent amount of use times. THe discs are also double sided as each side only holds 60 minutes of video per side. So if if you had a film that couldn't fit in 60 minutes, you would need to flip the disc over to play the rest.
As for the titles available for the format, there was quite a few. the first title available for the format was Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown, a 1977 adventure comedy film featuring Charles M. Schulz's lovable Peanuts characters. One of the more obscure films in the franchise compared to the classic holiday specials that aired in the 60's, but still a decent entertaining film for the kids.
RCA did manage to get a decent amount of support from various movie studios to produce films for the format. Obviously Paramount was on board as you can tell from Star Trek and Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown, but also Universal, Columbia, MGM, Vestron Pictures, and even Walt Disney and former rival CBS brought film over for the format. So that meant that the CED got many of the more popular films of both the 80s and the last couple of decades on the format like Casablanca, Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Alien, 9 To 5, Ghostbusters, The Terminator, The Godfather, Grease 1 and 2, the Star Wars trilogy, Back To The Future, All the James Bond movies up to A View To A kill, King Kong, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (Both the 1956 and the 1978 versions), Psycho 1 and 2, and Vertigo to name a few.
So how did the CED do in the marketplace? Answer: Miserably! While the initial sales were good the fell off shortly, players were made until 1984, and new releases continued to be made until 1986. All the while RCA lost millions of dollars in the process resulting in GE reacquiring RCA shortly afterwards.
So why did the CED fail? for a number of reasons. One it's delayed release, RCA had initially planned for the machine to be launched in 1975, but the delays kept pushing it further back from ever being released when the concept would have seemed feasible for a consumer product. Had the machine launched in 1975 or even earlier, it might have stood a chance, but by 1981 it was competing with VHS, Betamax, and moreover, LaserDisc. VHS and Betamax had the advantage of longer playback and had the option to record, and LaserDisc had better quality, could be handled without the need of a caddy, and was read by a laser so there was no stylus to wear out.
The second was the playtime, only 1 hour of video could fit on a single side of a disc, if a film was more than 2 hours, it would need to be split into multiple discs and in some cases, if a movie's theatrical running time was only slightly longer than two hours, studios would often trim short scenes throughout the movie and/or employ time compression (speeding the extra run time out of the film) in order to avoid the expense of issuing two discs, and if you're a film buff that wants to see a full film in its original form, it may not all be there on those discs.
And the third and i think the biggest disadvantage was the video quality. It wasnt that much better than a standard VHS tape and although it was cheaper than LaserDisc, it wasnt that much better than a VHS or Betamax Cassette and didnt hold a candle to a LaserDisc.
With all these factors, it's no wonder why the system was a failure. Still it is an interesting footnote in history and while i have no desire to get one or any discs, i wouldn't mind having the chance to mess around with one in the future.
In conclusion, I hope you enjoyed my look at the The Realistic 16-301 CED Player, And this concludes my second SepTandy Spectacular, I also hope you've enjoyed taking another walk through Tandy Radio Shacks history. In the next Special I plan to take a look at the Tandy computers not made by Tandy, As I show the various clones and licensed Tandy computers sold throughout the world. But until then, that wraps it up, thanks for reading. See you next time!