Technology that you have bought that went nowhere...

[areaseven]

My laserdisc player. Sure, they have been around for years, but damn that DVD format.

I always thought LD had better picture quality than DVD, and I still do. And for some reason, Independence Day on LD is a lot louder and crisper than the DVD version.

[areaseven]

- Nokia communicator (I used it for a year and loved it, but the rest of the world didn't) I could actually touch type on that thing.

Actually, only America doesn't like Nokia. If you travel to the rest of the world, almost everyone uses Nokia.

As far as cell phones go, Motorola seems to be a dying breed, and it's been like that since they finally put their overrated RAZR to rest.

[Einherjar]

Hopefully, the DVD still works because it's still shrink wrapped, but it says the self life is supposed to be a year. I got it in 2003. I'm kind of interested what the heck this Nappy Roots DVD is all about.

That sounds so much like the DiVX garbage Circuit City sold back in 1999. Look what that got them. Oh yeah, that's right! Circuit City went under already.

They only get the really lazy or crafty customers who know how to fight greed with greed, which I endorse for this useless piece of garbage. I dare a company to pull the same stunt with a Blu-Ray disc one of these days.

[Ghost Train]

Actually, only America doesn't like Nokia. If you travel to the rest of the world, almost everyone uses Nokia.

As far as cell phones go, Motorola seems to be a dying breed, and it's been like that since they finally put their overrated RAZR to rest.

I remember when the Razr came out lol. I was on an out of town project at the time and had to fly to Jersey every week. In the airport every corporate desk jockey who wanted to look l33t would have a blackberry on one holster (back then it was b/w blue framed model) and the razr on the other.

But I hated mine . Had terrible reception. I had recently switched over from T-mobile because I was getting crap reception. I figured that switching to Cingular - which was the only razr seller at the time would improve reception as it operated under the 850 band (low frequency = more energy = easier to penetrate walls). The laws of physics of course need not apply to cell phone carriers as my reception was even worse.

I was basically stuck with an expensive piece of "man-jewelry." To add insult to injury, 1+ year later Razrs were being given out for free with contracts by almost every other carrier. I will never be a first-adopter again.

[areaseven]

Last year, my cousin gave me a PalmOne. Then I realized that it not only had problems saving addresses, its only means of PC linkup was a 9-pin serial cable. So I gave the dinosaur back to my cousin.

[JB0]

That sounds so much like the DiVX garbage Circuit City sold back in 1999. Look what that got them. Oh yeah, that's right! Circuit City went under already.

Ah, but FlexPlay works in a standard DVD player.

It doesn't require you to buy a special player at a hundred-dollar premium. It doesn't have to phone home to work. There's nothing proprietary at all. It just degrades really fast once it's exposed to air.

Coincidentally, they were pushing it heavily for preview and review copies when I first heard of it.

[Noriko Takaya]

Ah, but FlexPlay works in a standard DVD player.

It doesn't require you to buy a special player at a hundred-dollar premium. It doesn't have to phone home to work. There's nothing proprietary at all. It just degrades really fast once it's exposed to air.

Coincidentally, they were pushing it heavily for preview and review copies when I first heard of it.

And if you have the software to do it, you can copy it to your computer to burn on a normal DVD to make it more permanent. Oops! Did I just say that?

[Negotiator]

I would say beta, but its actually continued to survive in the tv biz since it was created.

Only just recently, we're moving away from it onto different hd formats like Hd betas,

Hd mini dv, hd xdcams, etc...

So I'll go with 3DO for going nowhere.

[F-ZeroOne]

I always thought LD had better picture quality than DVD, and I still do. And for some reason, Independence Day on LD is a lot louder and crisper than the DVD version.

I don't know how true this is, but someone once told me thats something to do with the compression DVD uses. Its noticeable that when I play a DVD, its quieter than what I might have been watching on TV before...

[Excillon]

Just thought of another one. Neo-Geo...cool games, badass system, never saw it again.

Also, hitting a little closer to the toy realm...

The Gyromite robot. Cool idea, never really panned out though.

[JB0]

I would say beta, but its actually continued to survive in the tv biz since it was created.

Only just recently, we're moving away from it onto different hd formats like Hd betas,

Hd mini dv, hd xdcams, etc...

Not to mention that Sony's Beta patents were licensed to other companies for VHS. So even if they never sold a Beta player, they still made a killing.

I don't know how true this is, but someone once told me thats something to do with the compression DVD uses. Its noticeable that when I play a DVD, its quieter than what I might have been watching on TV before...

Yeah. DVDs use MPEG2 video compression. Laserdisks store a raw composite video signal.

A poorly-mastered or over-crowded disk will be a mess of compression artifacts.

But a properly-mastered DVD is better than Laserdisk, because it's not composite video.

The audio difference isn't actually related to compression.

As far as I know, it's because DVDs are mastered with more dynamic range than TV broadcasts. This is a good thing, believe it or not.

It means there's more distance between the low parts of the soundtrack and the high parts. So your quiet parts are quiet and your loud parts are loud.

Of course, having that range also means that everything isn't compressed up into the same volume level as the explosions, so yes, it IS quieter.

[areaseven]

I don't know if this is true, but I was told that one of the reasons Beta failed was that Sony refused to license the format to the porno industry, as they had full backing by Disney at the time.

[areaseven]

Just thought of another one. Neo-Geo...cool games, badass system, never saw it again.

The original Neo-Geo cartridge system was nothing short of a masterpiece. All the fighting games were better than their arcade counterparts and the joystick controllers were built rock-solid.

Unfortunately, the Neo-Geo CD was utter garbage. It only displayed a fraction of the colors of the original and the CD only read at 1x.

[Uxi]

SegaCD. I remember being in awe of the CD-quality sound.

[JB0]

I don't know if this is true, but I was told that one of the reasons Beta failed was that Sony refused to license the format to the porno industry, as they had full backing by Disney at the time.

Apparently, a lot of companies had been burned with Sony's professional U-Matic format, and were leery about trusting them. JVC was seen as a "safer" partner.

It also ran into a technical problem in that you can't fit as much tape in the smaller cassettes, so VHS had superior runtime. That probably made the difference in the consumer's eyes.

According to Wikipedia, this was the BIG difference, since you could record a night of television(or a single football game) on a VHS tape, and you couldn't on Betamax.

Beta which was designed for a 1-hour tape initially. VHS started with a 2-hour tape, and the 2x long-play mode was available at US launch, making it 1 hour VS 4 hours.

I've heard the porn argument before, but I'm not sure how much that affected it.

Certainly, the ability to buy movies probably made a bit of a difference, but I'm not sure if... other... programming was a major market force.

The original Neo-Geo cartridge system was nothing short of a masterpiece. All the fighting games were better than their arcade counterparts and the joystick controllers were built rock-solid.

Unfortunately, the Neo-Geo CD was utter garbage. It only displayed a fraction of the colors of the original and the CD only read at 1x.

Errr... The NeoGeo home system had fighting (and other) games that were IDENTICAL to their arcade counterparts, not superior ones.

Seriously, it's the EXACT same ROMs in the home carts and the arcade carts.

And the NeoGeo CD used the same hardware as the NeoGeo console/arcade boards(with the addition of a CD controller and data RAM), so I'm not sure where this "fraction of the colors" argument comes from.

Maybe the TV encoder circuit, which fluctuated a LOT over SNK's manufacturing run(with wild variances in final image quality due to it), but that hits the cart-based system more. The disk-based one is more consistent, and from what I've read, generally has better TV out.

Now, some of the later games DID have graphics alterations to fit within the system's RAM limit, but that's not all, or even most games, and the alterations weren't simple color reductions anyways(omitted background objects and reduced-detail character sprites).

So.... [citation needed]?

The 1x drive I don't dispute, though. It DEFINITELY hurt, given most of those games were written to run off ROM carts(load times weren't NEAR as painful on SegaCD and TurboCD, where they didn't have to copy several megabytes of data into RAM at once). And that was really enough to wreck the advantage of 50-buck arcade-perfect ports(with the home carts costing 200+ each due to the massive amounts of ROM in them, it's fairly obvious why the NeoGeo never caught on).

The 3rd revision(2nd outside Japan), the CDZ, alleviated the issue somewhat with a better drive and large read cache. It was still 1x, but it generally loaded faster(and was misidentified as having a 2x drive in several places).

[PetarB]

My first computer - a Mattel (yes they sold computers) Aquarius.

Pretty quickly I was writing my own games in BASIC.

[taksraven]

Just out of interest, did anybody here ever get a Commodore CDTV unit? Wanna tell us about it?

Taksraven

[JB0]

My first computer - a Mattel (yes they sold computers) Aquarius.

I'm SO sorry!

Just out of interest, did anybody here ever get a Commodore CDTV unit? Wanna tell us about it?

Don't own one, but...

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/comput...?c=106&st=1

It was basically an Amiga 500 computer with a CD-ROM drive in a snazzy case. Floppy drive, keyboard, and mouse sold separately.

So you really didn't get screwed too badly even though Commodore failed to support the machine. You got an Amiga PC to play with.

...

Huh... interesting coincidence here...

"The manager of the team promoting the CDTV was Nolan Bushnell, the man who founded Atari. By strange twist of fate, the man in charge of Atari at the time, was Jack Tramiel, the man who founded Commodore."

[Einherjar]

I got a bunch of free rotating fans from The Sharper Image before they went under. None of them are Ionic Breezes. Some of them have a wireless remote control to operate it from a distance. Sounds like a convenience, but I had a hard time trying to program them, they have to be turned on with the fan or something, and the ones that worked fizzled out for no reason. They weren't having battery problems, but I'm suspicious about the magnetized placeholders they have on the fan. Most of them were new, but now there's little to no chance of getting them serviced.

[Jack Verse]

What seemed like a good idea at the time was getting a Toshiba laptop...

Yeah it sucks when you turn on the internal wireless card and it either freezes the laptop completly or it blue screens you. Plus no-one could ever figure out why the internal wouldnt work because all the techs i took it to, even toshibas techs, said it was spyware, even though i had anti-spyware on the damn thing in the first place. And now it just sits on my bookshelf as a $1,500.00 paperweight.

[Shaorin]

I always thought LD had better picture quality than DVD, and I still do. And for some reason, Independence Day on LD is a lot louder and crisper than the DVD version.

LD has WAY better sound quality than any other Home Video format, DVD included. in fact, DIGITAL AUDIO LDs, first introduced in 1984/85, share the exact same SONY/PHILIPS "Redbook" specifications as the Compact Disc.

needless to say, i'm a big LD fan. i have a personally modified 1988 PIONEER CLD-3030 LD player and about 100 discs, half of that Anime. one of my dreams is to get the "Mamotte Shugogetten" T.V. Series LD collection...

one of the gems of my small collection; the japanese market release of the MACROSS PLUS MOVIE EDITION:

Edited September 6, 2009 by Shaorin

[areaseven]

Damn, seeing that LD player makes me feel old. And you're lucky to get a Macross Plus title on LD (probably the only format of the series I don't have).

[anime52k8]

LD has WAY better sound quality than any other Home Video format, DVD included. in fact, DIGITAL AUDIO LDs, first introduced in 1984/85, share the exact same SONY/PHILIPS "Redbook" specifications as the Compact Disc.

I Like DVD's because they're smaller than a dinner plate

[blacklotus]

I Like DVD's because they're smaller than a dinner plate

And I love my half-terabyte 2.5" HDs over blu-rays and DVDs. Cheap, fast and reliable/efficient. And engineers always claim one can only choose 2 out of the 3.

Ooo...nice pictures of the LDs, Shaorin. Reminds me that I have copy of the Macross Plus LD in my cabinet as well. Time to take it for a spin I think. Haven't watched it in ages.

BTW, my first anime and anime LDs are the Aah Megami-sama OVAs (Oh My Goddess OVAs). That's why Belldandy will always hold a special place in my heart.

Alright, back on topic,

my partial list of overpriced, obsolete tech stuff:

1) Atari ST

2) Amiga 500

3) Casio Cassiopeia PDA

4) Sony PSP 1000 aka PSP FAT

5) Sega Gamegear with 1 game: Mortal Kombat

6) all 3 Motorola phones I bought (slow, overpriced and buggy)

7) Pioneer LD players with about 200 LD titles bought in 1995-1998, to be partially replaced by about 300 DVDs (1999-2007). That's why I didn't even bother about blu-rays or HD-DVDs.

Palm V

Edited September 6, 2009 by blacklotus

[VT 1010]

LD has WAY better sound quality than any other Home Video format, DVD included.

On specs alone, DVD is still superior. The PCM tracks can have a sample rate of 48kHz, compared to Laserdisc's 44.1kHz. In addition, DVD can support Dolby Digital at a bit rate of up to 448kbit/s. Most DD tracks on LD only had a bit rate of 384kbit/s (IIRC). In practice, however, LDs would often sound better than their DVD counterparts--especially the ones released early on in DVD's life. There's also the mixing. For example, the DTS track on the Jurassic Park DVD not only had a lower bit rate, but also had a different mix than the Laserdisc. Now if you drag Blu-ray into this conversation, LD has no real comparison.

As far as video is concerned, you also have the issue of chroma noise. This is due to--as JB0 stated earlier--it's an analog composite video format, where as DVD is digitally compressed YCbCr video. To get the most out of LD's picture, you need a good player and a good comb filter (in either the player or the display). Provided a DVD is mastered properly, this kind of noise shouldn't be an issue.

That said, I still don't know why Laserdisc is in a thread about tech that went nowhere. It was around for twenty-four years and evolved throughout its lifespan, pioneering (no pun intended) many of the standard features that are on DVD and Blu-ray. I hardly think it qualifies as having gone nowhere.

Shaorin, that's a nice anime collection. I still need to get M+ on LD. I'm still too embarassed to admit how much I paid for DYRL? Perfect Edition on LD and my CLD-97. In the end, it was worth it. Picture and sound quality aside, LD definitely has nicer artwork on the packaging. They were far too often pieces of art themselves--especially the anime releases.

[Einherjar]

Any tax software. They become obsolete by the next year, so you're forced to buy the new version if you do your tax work by yourself.

[Akilae]

RD-RAM. I bought into it, and for a time had a wonderfully stable system that kept up performance with newer machines. Then the industry decided to conspire against Rambus and the whole thing died. No matter what you feel about Rambus, if Samsung and their ilk hadn't conspired to price RD-RAM out of the market, the technology itself was very sound.

I also bought into MD players, but for me it's not a piece of technology that went nowhere. It only went nowhere in the US. I used my Sharp MD player for damn near a decade, and even recorded many a lecture on it.

[Excillon]

I remember having something unique, I've never seen since. Back in the early 90's, I had a CD5 (remember those?) from Faith No More's album "Angel Dust" that said on it that if you play it in some kind of player, a holographic 3D image of the bird on the cover appears. Don't remember the player, and the CD is either in the bottom of a box or gone. Anyone know what this was?

[areaseven]

Did anyone here buy into Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) back in the mid-1990s?

[bluemax151]

I still have a Neo Geo Pocket Color that didn't really go anywhere. It was way better than the game boy color but obviously inferior to the later released Game Boy Advance. The analog stick on the NGPC is one of the best on a hand held to this day IMO. It's really too bad the selection of games was really limited.

[taksraven]

Did anyone here buy into Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) back in the mid-1990s?

DCC or DAT? Actually I think that there was two formats, wasn't there? A competition in a format that was rapidly going out the window altogether. What a great idea.

Taksraven

[sharky]

DCC or DAT? Actually I think that there was two formats, wasn't there? A competition in a format that was rapidly going out the window altogether. What a great idea.

Taksraven

I always chuckle when I see Shinji in Evengalion listening to music from his DAT player because apparently that was going to be the future of how kids listen to music. :lol

[F-ZeroOne]

I wasn't old enough to remember much about it, but we bought a relative a Kodak disc camera once. Anyone remember those? (the frames were stored on a disc instead of a film roll; to this day I'm still not entirely sure what the point was... ).

[jenius]

I still can't get my annihilatrix working...

[VFTF1]

Well... some technology that I still have lying around that went nowhere - although I'm sad about it are...

My Nintendo Entertainment System. The one I got (when I was like 10 or something) had Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt AND some olympics sport game + that big floor thing with the numbers on it that you could run on and plug into the system. Even my mom got into Super Mario Bros. She liked the colors and thought it was a quaint, entertaining and amusing game. I LOVED Skyshark - still have the game, but can't hook my nintendo up to anything, and don't have the controlers any more At one point I had a ton of umm...oh...what are they called?...the thingy...EMULATORS?...Yeah - I have EMU set up for NES on my regular computer (but the monitor stopped working...sigh... and so I don't use it/haven't used it any more...and what with my lovely laptop...I'm in no rush to get a new monitor)...

What else?

When I was a kid, I had a video camcorder. Actually - I had a second one in college, but (embarrased to admit this since it cost like 200 bucks or something)..I lost it (or maybe it got stolen? I remember the cam corder and a bag of Transformers just dissappearing...I should have reported it, but NOBODY stole anything where I went to college EVER so I thought I must have just lost it...whatever)...

Discmans, walkmans....CD Players..heh... hmm... all my old mobile/cell phones...including my "new" Motorola which I've had almost 2 years now and which doesn't feel so "new" anymore...gonna switch it on the 10th - I get to opt out of my contract and pick a new phone/new rates....good thing too. 2 years ago the depression was just beginning so phone bill didn't hurt so much. Now...ouch. Need to lower my rates

Umm... I dunno. I actually don't really use that much technology besides my laptop and phone.

I have a fax machine at home...

Pete