Digital Video Discs May Have Tough Time Displacing Existing Technology

Not that long ago, Super VHS was trumpeted as the future of video, the format that would wipe out all other systems.

For a while there, the pocket-size 8mm videotape format was supposed to do the same.

Somehow, neither format caught on. As it turned out, consumers were content with the standard VHS system, which they’d chosen over the technically advanced Beta format many years ago.

Beta’s superior sound and image didn’t matter then, and the quality of Super VHS and 8mm failed to change the minds of consumers already committed to VHS.

Still, that hasn’t hindered predictions that yet another technological breakthrough, the 5-inch digital video disc (DVD), is about to make all videotapes and laser discs worthless.

Last month, a DVD standard was established by Sony Corp. and Philips Electronics and their rivals, Toshiba and Time Warner.

The companies plan to release DVD software in late 1996 or early 1997. The players will cost around $500. Discs will run between $20 and $40.

Rex Wiener and Adam Sandler, writing in Variety, claim this agreement will clear the way “for the biggest revenue stream for copyright holders since the videocassette boom of the ‘80s.” They conclude that while it may not directly affect the videotape market, DVD “will likely have a more immediate impact on the sales of laser discs.”

The CD-size DVD discs, also called “high-density discs,” can carry an entire 130-minute movie on one side, complete with six-track stereo sound. (Laser discs are limited to one hour per side.)

DVD players will be compatible with CD-ROM discs and conventional CDs, and they can carry much more information than either of those systems. Also like those systems, they cannot yet record.

Ken C. Pohlmann, writing in Stereo Review magazine, claims the DVD will “make analog videotape obsolete” because it’s more convenient, looks and sounds better, and because “picture quality will equal or surpass that of laser disc, and sound quality will equal or surpass that of CD.”

Doug Pratt, editor of The Laser Disc Newsletter, refers to the DVD as “our midlife crisis.”

While insisting that “standard 12-inch laser discs will be around for some time to come,” Pratt feels that the new format “will take hold fairly rapidly and will come to dominate in the same way that CDs dominate audio cassettes today.”

This may well happen some day. But as Pratt points out, the hour has not yet arrived to junk or abandon your video library. There is even considerable evidence that the revolution will never happen.

Consumers may be less interested than DVD’s promoters in ditching the old technology.

As Peter M. Nichols recently wrote in The New York Times, “clarity of image doesn’t mean as much to the average home viewer as the price.”

Laser discs, which have always been superior to VHS, still are sold to a small if devoted market. It took years for VHS tapes and CDs to catch on with the public, which became interested when the hardware dropped below the $300 mark.

It will also be impossible for the DVD market to duplicate instantly the substantial catalog that CDs, videotapes and laser discs have taken nearly 20 years to establish.

Pratt’s new book, “The 1995 Laser Video Disc Companion” (Baseline, $39.95), takes nearly 1,000 pages to collect Pratt’s reviews of thousands of laser discs, many of them with special features not available on videotape editions of the same titles.

The laser market may be most vulnerable to the DVD threat, partly because DVDs and laser discs have so much in common and partly because laserphiles have always been attracted to the newest technology.

But many of them already have invested heavily in the format, which has improved tremendously over the past 15 years. Laser manufacturers have always tried harder, introducing stereo, letterboxing, digital remastering and audio commentaries.

Some out-of-production discs have already become classic reference points.

At this time, no one expects laser discs to reach the same mass market as videotapes. They’ve created their own niche.

Perhaps DVD will do the same.