Well as long as vectrex stays away from this PAL player he will be fine with his trick play on CAV discs.

So I guess we can now say without question that “every NTSC LaserDisc player ever made is capable of CAV trick effects”.

Possibly unless CAV was also done in the small size in which case I don't think my LD-V3000 would be able to do that but I'll check when I get it from storage.

Crikey, just searched for some info on the LD-V3000 - I'd never realised such a player existed! Very interesting.

I've just had a look at the manual (online here, https://manuals.lddb.com/LD_Players/Pioneer/LD/LD-V3000/LD-V3000-EN_Scan.pdf) and it does certainly handle all CAV functions.

I assume there was some reason Pioneer produced this? Industrial training discs I suppose, but were there many made in this size? The manual references "Self-Programmed Disc Playback", where a program recorded on the disc is automatically transferred into a memory inside the player. Does anyone have more information on this?

Sorry, dragging the thread off-topic, I should start a new one...

Don't know what the self programmed disc is but Memory is I believe the trick play or the things like still with audio or some of the strobe stuff and has
the memory to store it?

I'll have to check when I get out of storage.

The CLD-600, CLD-700 & CLD-800 (all PAL players) are similarly limited in their freeze-frame capabilities. Playback only with no "special" functions, and the remote strangely light on the button count.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if they were desperate to find any solutions to bring the prices down at least a little bit in the PAL market so somebody would buy them.

More likely it was an attempt to make more expensive models more appealing, much like how microchips will sometimes all built the same but with the budget versions having deactivated cores. There may be a huge range of chips and prices but they all cost the same to develop and manufacture because they are all the same thing.

I’m not really sure how removing CAV functions would save any money at all. A CAV disc in freeze frame is quiet literally just the player stopping the laser and playing the same field over and over instead of moving one lap in every 1/60 of a second.

Fun fact: some USDM VW Jettas don’t have a traction control off button but you can in fact add one using all OEM stuff because it wasn’t worth the time to totally engineer it out.

Similarly I have a 2008 MacBook that originally didn’t ship with a backlight keyboard but when my keyboard died and I had to replace it I bought the light up one and it plugs right in with brightness level controls and everything just as if it were OEM. There was no $$$ point in making a new motherboard without that socket and those traces on the PCB. The point was to get $100 more from the guy who would pay $100 more but still sell units to as many people as possible. Ideally these kinds of units don’t sell at all, they persuade you to buy the next level up player now that you see how much valuable it is.

Although when the Pioneer CLD-1200 was launched in the UK, it was the only Pioneer machine in the range - up against the (CAV-equipped) Philips CDV475 and Marantz CV-55 - so you'd imagine they'd have included the trick-play features if there had been no financial reason not to.

I think the trusty LaserDisc Review magazine may hint at the answer here:
http://magazines.lddb.com/Laser.Disc.Review_UK/1988/Laser.Disc.Review_no.19_1988.12-600dpi.pdf
...on page 21, the article "The RGB Connection - the 8-field PAL sequence"

This says that PAL fields are grouped into sequences of 8, so if you extract just 2 fields for a freeze frame "the bandwidth of the signal is reduced". I don't understand the technicalities of it all, but maybe a little extra circuitry was required to give a reasonable PAL freeze-frame, and this could be why the feature was sometimes dropped.

That’s interesting. I think you may be right. I think by the time the decks had digital frame buffers this may have been eliminated but it could have been an issue on PAL decks in the more analog times. One more reason PAL and LD are like oil and water to me.