i know people swear by records, i grew up with LPs but i have a transcription player and when playing a CD and LP of the same the CD has more bass and a more full range of sounds.

when i play a LP it almost sounds like i turned down all of the bass, mid and treble.

if i had the space i would pickup CED as i have seen some titles that i would like but i rent and when you rent you move and when you move it's hard to lug all your stuff around

Yeah, renting and moving a lot isn't so hot for CED colllections. You probably could be okay with collecting the most interesting CED discs that were not released on LDs. There's something like a hundred of those, but only about half of them are really good movie titles to have.

but still i would have to make space for another player and even more space for the discs.
right now my collection says i only have 355 but i have 4 box sets with 8 or more discs.
so going by disc i probably have aroud 450 with all the box sets, CAV etc.

I got into the CED format strictly by chance. A friend had a player and several dozen discs that he didn't feel like taking on a several hundred mile relocation and he let me have them for free. I've always been fascinated by old tech and went home, hooked the player up, and watched "Raiders of the Lost Ark". The picture was O.K., the sound was really quite good and it only skipped a couple of times. I was entranced. This was a vinyl record, for heaven's sake! How did it do what it did? I checked out CED Magic online and began to read about the format. I'll be the first to admit that there are "better" ways to watch a film, but I'm just amazed at the process. I've hit several of the Salvation Army resale stores and other second hand outfits in my area and between them and one, very lucky, Ebay deal, now have about 300 CEDs.
I fully embrace (to the great detriment of my bank account) new technology. I LOVE my Bluray, DVD, Laserdisc etc. players but there's just something nostalgic and fun playing with older machines. If you're REALLY concerned about image and sound quality the only option you've got is to rent a theater and screen "Citizen Kane", or whatever, from a pristine copy. I make do with some decent speakers and a variety of monitors.
Off topic a bit, CED allowed me to increase the number of variations I own of "Goldfinger". Mark Evanier once said that they keep coming up with new formats just so he'll have to go out and buy "Goldfinger" again. I'm reminded of Tommy Lee Jones in "Men In Black", holding a piece of ultra-advanced alien tech, saying "Well, looks like I've got to buy the "White Album" again!". I now have "Goldfinger" on VHS, BETA, CED, Laserdisc (four different),DVD (two different) and Bluray. I think the only version I'm missing is a nice 35mm theatrical print!

I've never seen a CED play a movie. I think the tech is fascinating. At this point in life, I'm HOH (hard of hearing) and therefore all of the movies I watch have to have CC. So I guess it's a little too late for me and CED. I say more power to you collectors out there who love the format.

well i'm going to sell my SFT100 player and i have about 30 or so discs.
if anyone is interested send me a message.
the player just had all belts replaced and works fine.

Hello all, this is my first post in this forum. I'm only posting because my friend Rix over at the CED Magic forum said there was a friendly discussion going on about laserdisc and CED so I thought I'd wage my opinion. I began my CED collection about a year ago and my laserdisc collection about 3 months ago. It's funny, I had always wanted a LD collection but the opportunity had never presented itself, affordably. About a year ago I saw a listing on craigslist of a ton of CED discs and a couple players and the only reason I knew what they were was because I had run across one at a thrift store and was amazed by how it was a record that produced video. I was dumbfounded. So when the craigslist listing showed up I bought them and to my surprised I loved them, the cover art, the way they worked, the nestalgia, and just the fact that hardly anyone even knew what they were. I did some more craigslist searching and to my amazement I found tons more dirt cheap, pennies on the disc. So that's how I came to collect CED and to this day I have about 1,000 titles and 9 players, which I don't think I've spent more than a couple hundred dollars on the entire collection. Now for laserdisc, as I mentioned I had always wanted to collect them just because they were cool looking. When people start talking about picture quality and audio quality on the different formats I stop listening. Personally I could care less, I like both formats for different reasons and picture/audio quality is not one of them for either format. Again with laserdisc the cover art usually looks amazing, I also like how they are the size of a record. But to me I just think of laserdisc and a shiny disc read by a laser, really no different then a CD, or a DVD and when you can get an entire movie on one little DVD disc why waste the space with a giant 12" disc that looks and acts exactly the same. But just the cool factor alone makes laserdisc far better then DVD's. The only downside with laserdisc is that a lot of the good titles cost nearly as much as my entire CED collection. I don't like spending more then a couple bucks on any movie in any format so that is a big turn off for me with laserdisc. I'm also not a big fan of japanese writing all over my movie covers and that seems to be a big thing for laserdisc collections, getting titles only released in japan. I'm an American and I like the fact that CED were made right here in America. But I think each format has it's place in the hearts of collectors and I do not dislike any format, there are just some that I like better. I hope we can all be friends.

My CED collection came with two players, both of which were mechanically frozen. I paid to have what was supposedly the more durable model serviced and it only worked occasionally for a few months and then crapped out (it tracks mechanically, but doesn't seem to send the signal to the video out or the clock/counter). Therefore my *biggest* problem with CED is that I can't watch any of the hundreds of movies in my collection because the build quality of the players is less than a happy meal toy. Seriously, open one of those things up and tell me you've seen something crappier. Not exactly Leica-grade in there...not even Vizio-grade, honestly. Pioneer tech looks like science fiction next to CED, *and* it hit the market first.

My other problems are the fact that nearly every single other aspect of CED is inferior to LD. The sound is...actually pretty decent, I guess, the video is not very good at all. It barely holds its own compared to contemporary VHS, and that's assuming you won't have tracking issues.

The only redeeming factors of CED are the cover art (versus American LDs anyway) and I suppose CEDs are more patriotic for patriotic people. Not being patriotic this does nothing for me (as I assume it does nothing for non-Americans) but even if I were, CED is nothing to be proud of. Taking pride in having parents that procreated in the same country as what is basically the video equivalent to the 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Diesel makes no sense to me. I only take pride in a) things I can take credit for and b) things worth taking pride it.

To be totally fair, since CED struggled from (before) day one to exist and was killed after a very short time, we can't say for sure how good it would have turned out with some work. VHS improved a great deal and LD improved massively (Hi Vision, Dolby Digital, etc). When CED is compared to every other format as it existed in 1983 or whenever though, it comes out a distant last.

i agree with both ketonic and signo.
BUT let's not forget, before DVD, VHS was the leader.
it didn't matter that LD had better picture quality, it was not liked by a very large amount of people.
anybody that i ever knew that owned an LD player only had 10-25 discs tops.
majority of people like now don't really care about owning the discs, they wanted to rent them or like now
rent, watch on instant or other means.

i like owning stuff, and most of us here do too, but the Majority don't care about owning stuff.
my father bought the LD player for the family, he still has his player but really has no discs, i took them.
he has a DVD player but no DVDs, it was an extra that i didn't need anymore since i only had space for 1 and it was
a combo DVD player/recorder.

so that's really the problem, the rental market made and broke these video formats, "they" only want to rent stuff
that can't be copied like VHS, DVD etc.

Well, that's not all entirely correct about initial comparisons of CED vs other formats upon first debut, which was actually early in 1981, with the stereo models available in 1982.

Initial comparisons with both VHS and Betamax at that time were positive and CED's performance was considered equal to Beta 1, which was better than both VHS-sp and Beta 2, the two standard videotape speeds for release of studio motion pictures for home viewing. Of course CED did not record, the very thing most folks wanted.

Comparison to LD at that time (81-82) was also positive. LD had the edge in video/audio reproduction, but not by as much as might be expected. Again, within the time period stated, typical CED resolution was 260 lines, however, the SJT/SKT series models of 1983 increased that to nearly 320, much closer to the typical LD player resolution of that time, and better than Beta 1, and RCA included several releases with Dolby Surround 5.1. My SKT 400, which I keep in top shape, is outstanding in its reproduction of CEDs still, as if they were new.

The complaint about the players being of lesser construction than LD players or VCRs is obtuse considering the market RCA was aiming toward. RCA wanted to provide something that would be half the cost of a typical VCR and 1/3 or 1/4 of that of an LD player, that would provide the same A/V quality as VCR playback, and that they did. With proper maintenance, there is nothing inherently worse or flawed about a CED player's operation than that of a same period VCR. I've been dealing with CED player issues since the early 1980s and, in relative terms regarding number of units purchased, I've seen as many VCR and LD player problems as CED player problems. I think to make a comparison to a toy is unwarranted and inconsiderate to the significant technical acheivements of the format. Some people have had a poor experience with CEDs initially by getting uncared for players, and the experience sours the person on the format. If you haven't the expertise needed to keep the player in top shape, the format isn't for you. Not meant to be rude, just factual. You can count the number of good CED service techs still around on one hand nowadays.

Anyway, the welcome of a new forum member could have been better made. There was nothing improper or insidious being said by the new person having certain ideals, so why need there be such a sour response?

Isn't it bad enough when somebody trolls this forum to extoll the greatness of formats newer than the laserdisc like Blu Ray just to see how aggravated everyone will get. That's not necessary.

A better welcome would be to let the new member know CEDs are okay for them for whatever reasons, and we all don't try to collect Japanese LDs, plenty of us only go for the US releases. And LDs are not necessarilly as expensive as he might think and are a good value for the price in general, and good deals are not hard to find. Plus there's nothing wrong with just having only a small collection of them.

Um...really? That is pretty cutting edge!

My STG 250 was resurrected by CEDPRO. It...occasionally functions.

I'm going to try and get my SJT300 working myself using the new stylus that came with the reman, assuming they are compatible. I have hundreds of the discs and would like to actually watch them.

Sounds like a good plan to get the 300 operating, and it's an excellent player. The 250 is no slouch either. Sorry if I came across sounding hostile, didn't mean it that way.

You can see the releases that had dolby 5.1 here:

http://www.cedmagic.com/title-database/ced-titles.html

Titles marked with * are stereo, and titles marked ** or *** are Dolby 5.1

In regards to your 250, it should always function. What is the trouble? I just finished a 250 that occassionally worked. It now works always and it was not a big problem.

On the SJT 300, the stylus is model 154216, same stylus used in all SJT/SKT models, but is not the same as the one for the 250, see here:

http://www.cedmagic.com/tech-info/stylu ... guide.html

If it's only the matter of a stylus, that's an easy fix. If you haven't changed an SJT stylus before, you have to be a little careful taking it out properly. I'm working on an SJT 300 right now. The SGT 250 and SJT 300 share the same remote control by the way. If you have them both working, you would only need one remote.

Part of the enjoyment of watching a CED is having the right kind of set to watch it on. They generally do not do as well on modern sets as on CRT sets if using the A/V outputs, since the A/V seems set up for DVD watching. Sometimes with CEDs the RF analog output to channel 3 or 4 looks better than the A/V on many newer sets partly due to the newer sets technology to take interlaced analog input and make it progressive scan. I have the CED player on the Sharp Aquos LCD input on analog channel 3, and the stereo outs to the amp. Looks the best that way with less jaggies. But I really like the way the CEDs look on the Sony Wega HD CRT.