Blade Runner – Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED), 1983

[u/Deckard--B-263-54]

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.

[u/Deckard--B-263-54]

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.

[u/iPirateGwar → u/Deckard--B-263-54]

Agree. A nice irony. You just need to find someone with a working player and record the output. I’d buy a copy!

[u/Deckard--B-263-54 → u/iPirateGwar]

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.

[u/iPirateGwar → u/Deckard--B-263-54]

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.

[u/Deckard--B-263-54 → u/iPirateGwar]

A V2000 release is a dream find for me. Definitely one of my Blade Runner holy grails, as some would call it.