On the entertainment front, manufacturers are reporting an upturn in player sales to dealers in ten weeks this summer, RCA moved more CED players than it had since the product was introduced in March 1981, and sales of the Pioneer LaserVision system have also increased. Analysts estimate that in the consumer market RCA' s grooved capacitance technology is outselling Pioneer's optical, noncontact system by 10 to 1. Commercial and industrial customers seem to prefer the more expensive Pioneer product.
In what appears to be a conflicting trend, Montgomery Ward and Co. has dropped the CED videodisk player from its fall-winter catalog and has been heavily discounting the units in its stores. The price of Pioneer VP-l000 LaserVision players has also been extensively discounted. The Federated Group is reported to have cut VP-l000 prices in its 11 stores from the $749 list price to $288. Sansung Electronics America Inc. announced that it is shelving its plans to market a CED player this year, ostensibly because of the greatly eroding prices of the players already on the market.
Consumer disk sales continue to out pace projections with the average player owner purchasing more than 30 albums in the first year they own a player. It is expected that more than 5 million disks will be sold this year, up from last year's 1.4 million.
Pioneer Video is releasing a number of new LaserVision videodisks in an effort to regain a significant share of the entertainment disk market. "Star Wars," which will be priced at $34.95 heads the list, but other titles likely to be popular include "On Golden Pond," "The Jazz Singer," "Ragtime," "Sound of Music," and "West Side Story." In addition to these popular film titles Pioneer will also release the Royal Ballet's performance of "Swan Lake" and "Claude Bolling: Concerts for Classical Guitar and Piano."
At recent meetings in Detroit and Montreal, the National Library of Canada has exhibited a demonstration videodisk which introduces the Library and its services and, through sequences on topics such as "O Canada," illustrates the potential of the disk for library orientation applications.
The Library of Congress is also actively pursuing videodisk applications. With a new image storage and retrieval system with optical disk digital storage being tested by the Cataloging Distribution Service, the Library is now evaluating responses to a request for proposal for two more optical disk based image storage and retrieval pilot projects.
Utilizing technology similar to that in the NEC disk and in many business and training applications, part of the project entails the conversion of images from film, magnetic tape, photographic stills and graphic materials to analog storage on optical disk. The Library will assess the use of the technology for the storage and handling of nonprint materials concentrating on preservation aspects, the reference potential for serving public and staff needs and the increases in storage density made possible by using the disk technology.
The other part of the proposal targets the use of the disk for the storage of digitized images of printed library materials. The technology in this application will be similar to that used in the DEMAND system being implemented by the Cataloging Distributions Service. The system configuration will include an input scanning and keyboard entry subsystem, a direct read after write (DRAW) optical disk recording and play back subsystem, and an output system with high resolution CRT displays and printers. During the pilot project the documents input will be serials.
The successful implementation of such an approach could well be the first step towards a situation in which a user searches an online data base to identify relevant citations and then accesses a facsimile of the required item stored remotely on optical digital disk. Such an approach would appear to the user as similar to that used by Pergamon in its Video Patsearch system for accessing patent diagrams. The applications differ in that the data on the Patsearch disks is recorded in analog form and copies of the videodisks are held at the user workstation. In the Library of Congress proposal the images would be stored in digital form and transmitted to the user from a central location.
