Japan's 1980s 3D Videodisc system - 3D VHD

[Music] over the years I made a series of videos about the Lesser known Japanese video disc format of vhd now this was supposed to come out in the UK and the us but for reasons and circumstances I've covered in previous videos it only ever came out in Japan where it was a modest success it always played second fiddle to LaserDisc though it was offering much of the capabilities of LaserDisc but at a slightly lower resolution and at a lower price but as we've seen so many times before when a product to consumer electronics product is based around a price Advantage it's a product that's really built on shifting sounds and when the competitors can reduce their component cost you to economies of scale quite often that price Advantage gets eroded and therefore people will gravitate towards the more desirable product rather than the cheaper one and that's what happened here vhd came out in the early 1980s it met its most success in the mid 80s but by the end of the 80s it had died often just really fell into the karaoke Market however there was one thing that vhd could do that LaserDisc couldn't and that's 3D and we're talking proper field sequential 3D here with LCD shutter glasses that alternate the displays to each size you get a full color display unlike your cardboard glasses with your red and green red and blue and a glyph this is much the same as the system that we came to experience later on Via Blu-ray 3D but you're going to think this was the mid-80s 1985. this is about 25 years before the rest of the world got to experience 3D in full color offer home video disk system well back in Japan they were experiencing the same thing although at a much lower quality but let's have a look at the system the setup that you need to be able to experience 3D in Japan in the mid 1980s it took me quite a few years to get all these things together we'll start off with the vhd player not all players are capable of 3D but this HD 9300 is as you can see on the front panel we've got the appropriate socket to connect up our 3D glasses now if you had PhD player without that feature built in as long as it has an ahd socket on the rear that could then be linked up to an external 3D adapter to which you'd connect up your glasses and there were a variety of styles of 3D glasses this is Victor's 3D scope gloriously 1980s looking font on there big wide visor on the front but if we're flipping around we can see inside there are separate LCD shutters for each eye now this just plugs into the front of the machine with a standard three and a half mil mini jack but of course there is an extension lead that you attach to that so you can sit across the room of course all this will be useless without some 3D movies to watch I've collected together an assortment we've got jaws 3D the House of Wax Friday the 13th Part 3 and starchase of the legend of Orin which according to IMDb was the first animated 3D feature finally I need a screen to view these on I'm going to be using this professional JVC CRT that dates from 2004 ideally I'd want a bigger screen than this but it's the largest CRT that I own it's capable of producing a high resolution picture via component but that's going to be no use here as vhd only outputs composite video so with the glasses or Pfizer connected and a disk loaded I can experience 3D vhd for the first time 37 or so years after it came out the first thing you notice when you put that visor on is how much it dims down the image on the screen these are working just fine but even with the brightness of the monitor turned up as far as it will go and the lights in the room dim down it really does take your eyes sometime to become accustomed to this change in brightness ideally I'll be able to try this out on a brighter and larger screen than I've got here but the tech was designed to work with CRTs so when I tried it with an LCD TV the polarization on the glasses was at a 45 degree angle to the TV screen and that resulted in a blacked out image a quick test with my small OLED TV resulted in A Brighter Image but unfortunately the timing of the shutters was out of sync which led to a double image and unsurprisingly a similar thing happened when I attempted to use this with my main large OLED TV so I've got to use this with the CRT or nothing another big issue is Flickr Eddie light source at all within your peripheral vision flickers wildly through the glasses now this was a known issue and they included clip-on blinkers for the visor to try and mitigate the problem but in my experience the only comfortable way to watch one of these 3D discs is in almost complete darkness it's a matter of turning off the light and closing the curtains but then finally when you've settled down to watch your movie it's clear that some of these transfers aren't the greatest Friday the 13th in particular is very soft it reminds me of a second gen VHS bootleg so perhaps it's not such a hardship to watch these on a smaller screen after all because the larger you blow them up the worse they look so all these things combine to make this a less than ideal viewing experience more of a novelty than anything else vhd as a format existed before the 3D part came along and after it the 3D bit was just a brief blip in the middle it came and went in the blink of a shutter but talking to which let's just explain exactly how the system works so first off let's just have a look how a normal vhd displays its image and then compare that to the 3D version this is a vhd discount on one of the caddies and on one of these you can hold 60 Minutes of video on either side these things are spun at 900 RPM inside the machine and on each side you can have approximately 45 000 concentric rings that contain the video and audio information these are read with a Capacitive Stylus that tracks over the top one rotation of the disc contains two frames of video or four video fields and once it's read those two frames of video the stylus jumps into the next ring along and so on to read the whole disc now you'll notice the fact that there are two frames of video per rotation when you try and do a freeze frame because you keep your stylus in the same position but the disc is still rotating and as a result you'll see those two frames of video displayed there sometimes there might be no movement on screen for two frames and you get a perfect still frame other times when there is movement you'll see the jumping back and forth between those two frames but the ability of the stylus to jump in through these concentric Rings enables quite a lot of interactive capabilities I believe you could get from something at one end of the disc to the other end of the disc in under four seconds but more importantly you can jump between those Rings seamlessly and you can even Skip One or perhaps more without the beginning breakup in the video whatsoever now you can see this in interactive game demonstrations you could attach an MSX computer up to a vhd and you could have different video on say the even rings to the odd rings and if you wanted to jump seamlessly between whatever was playing on either of those two things with your computer you'd press your buttons and it would jump to the next one and this is the system that's used for the 3D rather than holding two frames of video per side we've got one frame of video for the right side one for the left eye however the 3D movies are also backwardly compatible and can be played in 2D and that is pretty clever how they managed to do that I've got a little diagram over here that I'll use to explain okay now this is a rather crude diagram it's only got six rings on here rather than the 45 000 that are on the real disc but you can imagine this is a little bit easier to see we have a right eye and then a left eye image and then it continues like that throughout the disk and the stylus moves in once it's at a full rotation to the next ring along now that works fine for 3D but there's a button on the front of the machine here and you can press it and you can watch this 3D movie there's a 2d movie and the way that that works is it changes the way the stylus tracks across the disk rather than doing a full rotation you get to see the right eye in red here once it gets halfway through it jumps a stylus into the next ring along and that's the right eye there and it jumps it to the next one along again so you're just watching the right eye image all the way through the only issue with that is though by jumping we've missed the audio that would have accompanied the left eye image and you might think it's not important but it would be very stuttery if you were to watch the whole movie and you're missing effectively half the audio that should be there so to get around this they've repeated the audio that would have been on the left eye on the right eye image that's on this next ring along but then that raises the issue if you were to play it as a 3D one you'd hear that audio repeated so the way it works in 3D is the stylus skips it plays this ring it skips at X1 it plays the X1 along so it's jumping through the odd rings on the disk and when you're watching in 2D you're getting half the ring played and it jumps into the next one it's very complicated as far as mastering these disks ago but enabled a 3D disc to be played in 2D the only issue with this system is that it jumps through a disk at twice the speed that you get on a normal one because we're jumping through the Rings quicker Therefore your 3D movies have to come on more discs this movie would normally have fitted on one vhd in this case it has to fit on two and each of these can hold around about half an hour on each side so every half hour you're going to take this out flip it over play the other side and of course as a result of having more discs the 3D titles would also be more expensive and overall it really just wouldn't have been worth it for most people back then I'm sure even the people that bought this setup would have lost interest in it pretty quickly the trouble was the 3D effect just wasn't all that impressive we're talking very low resolution we're looking at the 3D as an effect that seems to fall back from the frontal pain so really you get the people at the front talking and then you get the 3d effect behind them for the scenery but because it's such a low resolution your eye isn't drawn to that background you don't notice the depth so much because it's just mush especially when you get a 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio squashed along the top of the screen you're only looking at a fraction of the resolution of the full image over composite in 3D with a flicker it just isn't really a great experience at all as far as Friday the 13th goes well that one skipped a lot I've got some issues with the age of these discs at the lubricant I think has dried out a little bit on some of them so the stylus is skipping around but even so Friday the 13th very dark film yeah you can't really watch very dark 3D you need a nice bright scenery that's why it works particularly well with all the animations but talking of Animation didn't work very well with this one because they seem to just use two panes really for the 3D you've got the cells at the front so then you've got the background again and it didn't add anything to the film at all finally House of Wax that was the one that had the best experience with I watched quite a bit of this it seemed to have a reasonable 3d effect I think it was helped by the fact that it was filling up the full screen so I'm getting a higher resolution but you could have just quite as easily watched it in 2D and not felt like you'd missed out on anything it didn't really add to the experience and of course we've also got the aspect that everyone that has to watch these films has to wear some 3D goggles they've got to get them plugged into the front of the machine now you could attach multiple ones of these you could use a splitter on this device or there was a box available that you could attach four sets of 3D glasses so everyone could sit there watching this but can you imagine a house with a little screen at the front four people with these things on straight in looking at the blurry image trying to get the 3D out of it now you can see why it wasn't a success I applaud the effort but it was a little bit too early for the tech and as a result it just wasn't very impressive the films I've got here cover two periods of 3D movies the Harris of wax dates to 1953 what was known as the Golden Age of 3D movies at this point they were using a dual projector system to show 3D and these were viewed using polarized glasses their 3D was used to try and attract audiences away from their new television sets and back into the movie theaters by offering something that they couldn't experience at home Hollywood abandoned 3D though a few years later when widescreen movie presentations became a more successful way to attract those audiences but then we move on to the early 1980s movies these used a single strip anamorphic process that had been introduced with 1969's the stewardesses an R-rated feature that with a budget of a hundred thousand dollars made 27 million so again 3D was tried out as a potential response to the early home video boom giving audiences a reason to leave their homes and visit the cinema a few mainstream films were produced using this anamorphic 3D process but the fact that the films themselves just weren't very good pretty much sealed the fate of this brief 3D Revival for a while 3D presentations then became The Preserve of theme parks and IMAX documentaries until 2004's 3D IMAX showings of Polar Express indicated A Renewed level of mainstream interest in 3D which led to a 3D cinema boom but again this is one that now seems to have largely burned itself out now I've always been into 3D there's a a 3D picture of me if we get it focused you can see some lights got into the lens there well that's from a long time ago that was taken with a Nim's low 3D camera I think or something very similar to that so it's a lenticular print but going back to being a child I've got books about 3D and comics and as I grew up of course we got the virtual boy I bought that not when it was a collector's item but when it actually came out and of course 3DS and Blu-ray 3D but one of the things I bought as a result of this fascination with the subject of 3D was this the ultimate 3D collection this is after I got my DVD player in 98 this came out right about 2001 and it contained 3D shutter glasses an adapter to attach up to a DVD player and some 3D movies that had originated as IMAX 3D after buying that I then went looking for more content for it and one of the discs that I got at the time was this for million side little Jewels 3D and I didn't realize at the time when I got this this was around about 2001 but I don't know if you can see at the top there this has been directly taken as a copy from this PhD in fact it had the Japanese subtitles on it as well at the time I was wondering why is he got Japanese subtitles on this I knew it was a copy but I was thinking what can a Japanese system would have had 3D it just showed you how far ahead of the time this was that 16 years later people were still selling copies of the video from this rather dodgerly on DVD but the truth is I mean it still looked terrible however you try watch it so yeah this was a very shortly bit of entertainment in my house but it's just indicative of the fact that throughout my life I've always been fascinated with 3D which is why I really wanted to try out this 3D vhd system now whilst 3D on vhd was not the greatest of successes or even the greatest of experiences when 3D finally came into the home in the West on a larger scale and it was either on the TV or by a 3D Blu-ray of course I bought into that having the interest in 3D and I really enjoyed it I thought it was a great experience and I was watching via a 3D OLED TV which rather than doing interlace would give you full 1080p in both eyes it was a 4K OLED I'd watch with passive glasses I've got some clip-ons there was no issue of course with flicker with no recharging any of that business and one benefit to it which I hardly had whatever mentions is it really stopped you doing two screen watching you know you've got that thing when you're watching a movie and then you think oh what was he in and you get your phone out or your tablet whatever and start looking it up and then you start getting engrossed in some notifications or whatever the latest news is you end up watching two things at once and not really paid attention to either of them well with the polarized glasses you look down at a tablet or a phone and you can't really see the screen if so you just carry on watching the films but I think the fact I was kind of forced to watch the whole thing all the way through lights dimmed a little bit really added to the experience so I've got some very fond memories of watching 3D movies on my OLED TV unfortunately that TV died had to replace it 3D are gone you couldn't get an OLED TV with passive 3D anymore and my new larger OLED it's a great TV but I can't watch 3D on it so all by 3D Blu-ray movies they're all just sitting on the shelf that is the 3D vhd system I enjoyed looking at it it wasn't the best but I do enjoy playing around with this old Tech but we've ticked off 3D vhd I hope you enjoyed having a look at this here today but that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 256,539

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, 3D, VHD, retrotech, videodisc, 1980s, lcd shutter, Japanese, home video, 3-d, 3D VHD

Id: PxkNilHB9hc

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023