In 1926, John Logie Baird, a Scotsman, experimented with recording television signals onto 78rpm discs. The problem was, in those days the television images were of poor quality. Early in the 1970's, Telefunken of West Germany, and Decca of Great Britain, joined together to create colour video recordings on long-playing discs. They did this by using a system called Teldec. The major disadvantage was that the discs needed to rotate at a very high speed in order to play properly, and this made the discs wear badly. Unfortunately, the public never really accepted the system.
Competitive devices soon began to appear. One of the systems was called Laservision, which was produced by Philips. The compact disc sound system was developed from this equipment, and video disc systems based on the stylus tracking technique soon started to fall into disuse as the laservision optical disc and laser pickup system became more and more established.
It is hoped that with future video discs, there may be allowance for them to be formed with thin layers of a magnetic material. This will give the facility for home recording, at the moment they can only play pre-recorded discs. Development techniques used today involve pictures, graphics, sound and computer data being produced on screen.
The laser disc is an analogue playback system similar to the standard video cassette recorder, this differs from digital systems such as compact discs, for example, in the way that the information is stored on the disc and subsequently retrieved.
The race is now on to make full screen, full motion video available from standard audio compact discs, a feat requiring tremendous data compression techniques.
