Revolution in Sight

If today’s stereo gear makes the record player your family had when you were a child look as antiquated as the flatiron and the washtub, tomorrow’s video gear is likely to turn your current TV set and your copies of TV Guide into collectors’ items almost overnight.

The big item for Christmas this year is likely to be the video disc player. Unlike the video cassette recorder, it won’t record programs off the air. You’ll be limited to the discs you can buy in a store, but they’ll provide better picture and sound, and they’ll be cheaper than prerecorded tapes. The disc player will also be cheaper than the video cassette deck.

RCA’s Selectavision will retail for $495, about $150 less than the cheapest video cassette recorders. Video discs are digitally encoded – a series of pits in the surface of the disc read like a computer punch card to generate picture and sound. RCA’s design uses a stylus to pick up the information on the record, which spins at 450 rpm. The picture quality is said to be as good as the best broadcasts – much better than VCR pictures – and the sound quality is almost hi-fi (stereo is possible), a giant step for TV. Panasonic and JVC have indicated an interest in making units to play the same discs. There’s not much current information on what movies and programs will be available for selection.

Magnavox’s Magnavision is $200 more expensive. Its discs look much like RCA’s, but the two are incompatible. Magnavision discs are scanned by laser, so there is virtually no wear. The optical scanning system allows for reverse, freeze-frame, and slow motion action- particularly useful if you’re playing an instructional disc (one disc to be marketed for Magnavision features a Julia Child cooking lesson).

And each frame can be accessed directly by punching its number into the player – you don’t have to read through until you see what you want. That means that books could easily be packaged in Magnavision discs.

Whether people will pay an extra $200 for the Magnavox system depends on the availability of good programs. Magnavox is already publicizing its catalogue, which includes recordings made by MCA under the name Disco Vision. Appropriately enough for Disco Vision, one of the titles is the movie Saturday Night Fever. Other discs among the 200 or so titles include Jaws, The Sting, and Francis, The Talking Mule; lessons in cooking, needlecraft, and how to stop smoking; performances by the Martha Graham Company and Elton John; and sports packages ranging from prizefights to swimming lessons to skateboard safety. Half-hour programs will sell for $5.95, movies for $15.95.

Video cassette recorders still have the advantage of being able to record off the air, and manufacturers are introducing new models for Christmas, with a variety of convenience features but no improvement in picture quality. The price of VCR’s has been dropping steadily; at $650, the cheapest models are at least $100 less than last year’s bargains. Portable machines are available starting at $1200, and cameras run from $850 to $2000. There are still two incompatible types of cassette on the market – Sony’s Beta format and the VHS format sold by Panasonic, RCA, Quasar, Magnavox, JVC, and Hitachi. Sanyo and Toshiba make machines for both formats. Sony’s Betamax was the first to be introduced, and the trade name almost became a synonym for “video cassette recorder,” but the VHS has outstripped it in popularity by offering better picture quality, longer playing time, and longer tape life.

One other shadow besides the video disc hovers over the video cassette industry, and that’s the suit brought against Sony by Walt Disney Productions and Universal Studios, who claim that Sony is encouraging copywright infringement by selling machines that will record their movies off the air. (One footnote to the lawsuit: The parent company of Universal is MCA, manufacturer of Disco Vision.) The lawsuit hasn’t slowed down the manufacture and sales of VCR’s a bit.