I had a few of these machines and quite a few discs. You most surely can scratch them, although the loading system is supposed to prevent that.

I was surprised to find that the quality wasn't terrible, provided the disc was in good condition.

Oh, and there's also this site dedicated to them: http://www.cedmagic.com/selectavision.html

I used to know someone whose roommate at film school in the late 80s spent the entire second half of her masters degree program working almost entirely with a Videodisc player she found at the thrift shop with a skipping copy of Jane Fonda's Workout permanently jammed in it.

But Beta. OZ, are you rehabilitating my dream here? Would it be possible to manipulate the disc with your hand to advance, slow down, and pause the image on the screen? If you dragged the stylus back and forth in the groove, would it cause some kind of visual effect to happen (static? something else?)

I don't know about that, she was just advancing it to different points and using the tiny loops that it created when it skipped.


I do know that a bandmate of mine saw a noise show in the mid 2000s where someone had "cut video clips onto vinyl" somehow and was DJing with them, but I have no idea what he meant, because I missed that show. It seems totally possible that one of these could be opened up and treated like a normal turntable, although the styluses were insanely expensive even a decade and a half ago last time I checked. Hundreds of dollars for a working NOS one. So it wouldn't be something I'd want to make a long term habit of messing with.

Either your bandmate and mine were at the same show or... WE'RE IN THE SAME BAND

Thanks for that clarification, now I will go back to quixotically searching for this lost/found/lost performance idea that is somehow simultaneously amazingly cool, somewhat unlikely, and for which no hard evidence exists.

Same with Video Disc

I had two. Both needed new belts for the loading mech, but other than that thew worked flawlessly.

Until the one day when one of them stopped having sound. By that time, the novelty wore off, and I just sold them (and all my discs) to the first interested party.

Of the many discs I had, I think the ONLY stereo one was The Tubes Video.

James bond, Hercule Poirot, dozens of others . . . all mono.