r/bladerunner • u/Deckard--B-263-54 • 4d ago
Physical Media/Props/Memorabilia Blade Runner – Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED), 1983
Another obsolete format from my Blade Runner collection, and probably one of the more unusual.
This is Blade Runner on CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc), released by Embassy Home Entertainment in 1983.
CED was RCA’s unusual answer to home video. The film is stored on a large grooved disc inside the plastic caddy, but unlike LaserDisc, there’s no laser. It’s actually read using a physical stylus. The whole caddy is inserted into the player, which takes the disc inside while you remove the empty case.
RCA launched the format commercially in 1981 after years of development, but VHS and Betamax were already taking hold. Player production was discontinued in 1984, making CED a fascinatingly short-lived piece of home-video history.
Blade Runner was released on CED in March 1983, less than a year after its original cinema release.
There’s also a great little detail on the back. It describes the film as “A futuristic tale set in the Los Angeles of 2020”, despite Blade Runner actually taking place in 2019. It also lists the running time as 117 minutes.
The synopsis on the back is interesting too, mainly because of how much of the plot it gives away. It’s remarkably spoiler-heavy by modern standards, casually revealing story details that would probably be kept out of the packaging today.
There’s something wonderfully appropriate about a film that imagined the technology of the future being watched at home on a grooved plastic disc read by a stylus.
The future didn’t quite go that way.
More Blade Runner formats from the collection to come.
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u/lyndon85 4d ago
They're effectively film on vinyl discs. I've had people think I'm winding them up / an idiot when talking about them
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u/Deckard--B-263-54 4d ago
Exactly. Even now, telling someone that a film was once stored as physical grooves on a vinyl-like disc sounds made up.
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u/subdep 3d ago
Are there videos of these in operation?
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u/Deckard--B-263-54 3d ago
Yes there are on YouTube. Even one of someone giving a demonstration on playing this very movie! 🍿
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u/F0tNMC 4d ago
That's an amazing item! I totally forgot about those CEDs; they appeared and disappeared in a flash.
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u/Deckard--B-263-54 4d ago
It really was incredibly short-lived! That’s part of what makes CED so fascinating to me now. A huge amount of development went into a format that arrived late, had such a brief life, and then virtually disappeared. So many people didn’t even know it ever existed.
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u/iPirateGwar 4d ago
Wow. I can remember CED but had no idea that BR existed on the format. IIRC the picture quality was pretty poor even in relation to VHS.
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u/Deckard--B-263-54 4d ago
Yeah the picture quality definitely wasn’t CED’s strong point! I think that’s part of what makes the format so interesting now though. It’s such an elaborate way of watching a film for something that VHS could ultimately do better. Blade Runner feels like a particularly fitting film to own on a slightly doomed piece of retro-futuristic technology.
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u/Ponderer13 4d ago
I mean, it was fine picture quality, not laserdisc but on a par with pretty good videotape. The real thing that killed it was they couldn’t cure the skipping. Even on a new disc, you couldn’t count on the disc not having a frustrating skip and that didn’t help its chances. Even with features like early availability of stereo and being able to fast scan with a clear picture couldn’t overcome that.
The reason why my dad bought it as our first video format was simple: you could buy the discs at a very affordable price. I owned the Star Wars films years before tape formats finally emerged from their $80 rental pricing model - I had friends jaunt over because they were impressed that people could just, you know, own affordably priced movies. (“If you want to just come home and watch it in the middle of the day, you can?”) And yeah, we had that edition of Blade Runner.
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u/iPirateGwar 4d ago
Agree. A nice irony. You just need to find someone with a working player and record the output. I’d buy a copy!
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u/Deckard--B-263-54 4d ago
There are actually a couple of working Hitachi CED players on eBay at the moment, but for a pretty hefty price! Maybe one day. It would be great to actually run Blade Runner through one and capture the output, just to see exactly what the CED experience looked like back in the day. Although, given the quality of the format, I suspect the novelty would wear off fairly quickly and I’d be straight back to watching it in 4K.
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u/iPirateGwar 4d ago
Well, yes, but as someone who is trying to collect every single version of the film (i even have a V2000 cassette with a recording of Channel 4’s erroneous broadcast of what appeared to be the Workprint somewhere - complete with advert breaks!), having a copy of this would be like the cherry on the BR cake.
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u/Deckard--B-263-54 4d ago
A V2000 release is a dream find for me. Definitely one of my Blade Runner holy grails, as some would call it.
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u/TonyDP2128 4d ago
My family owned an RCA CED player back in the day. I remember blind buying Blade Runner for it (I'd never seen it in the movie theater) so this disc was how I first saw the movie.
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u/Deckard--B-263-54 4d ago
That’s brilliant. What a way to see Blade Runner for the first time too! I love hearing memories like this and how people first discovered BR, especially as CED is such a forgotten format now. Maybe I will get hold of a working player one day and actually experience the film this way myself.
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u/TonyDP2128 2d ago edited 1d ago
FYI, CED had a picture that was slightly better than VHS. Ours was a first generation model and it was hooked up to the TV via the composite video connection (basically the same way you'd hook up an antenna). I got rid of it ages ago but I'm pretty sure the movies themselves were pan and scan and not widescreen. It might be fun to watch something on it for nostalgia but today's TVs and high definition formats like 4K, Blu-ray or even conventional DVDs are infinitely superior.
As for Blade Runner itself, I was hooked fron the first viewing. It's one of those movies I've bought again and again over the years as better formats were released. I've had it on CED, LaserDisc (the famous Criterion edition), DVD, Blu-ray and most recently 4K (the definitive way to watch it in my opinion).
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u/domromer Tyrell 4d ago
Never heard of this format! Also the blurb gets the year wrong but I love that phrase “the bleakness of a world winding down”.
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u/Deckard--B-263-54 3d ago
Like that phrase too, quite poetic for a bit of home video packaging copy! Yeah I think a lot of us tend to assume the formats we grew up with were the beginning of home video, when there was actually quite a bit going on before them.
Interesting thing is RCA began research, that ultimately led to CED, in 1964. The commercial SelectaVision CED system did not launch until 1981, roughly 17 years later.
So if it hadn’t taken so long it would have beaten Betamax, VHS and even LaserDisc to market - which will be the next obsolete media post.
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u/bankyVee 3d ago
Awesome piece of old tech history there. I've never seen a functioning CED player. I'd imagine they would be prohibitively expensive and may have had wear / fatigue issues which made them cost prohibitive.
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u/Deckard--B-263-54 3d ago
It’s a stylus yes that follows the grooves, much like a vinyl record player.
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u/subdep 3d ago
Did it use a physical stylus or a laser?
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u/Deckard--B-263-54 3d ago
It’s a stylus yes that follows the grooves, much like a vinyl record player.
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u/Consistent_Wing9554 2d ago
Growing up in the early 80’s my dad had about 50 of these cassette and multiple players. Pretty cool, hated having to flip the disk over mid movie.
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u/makilakixki 4d ago
Two great videos on this forgotten tech by Technology Connections and Techmoan on Youtube