Top 10 glorious technology failures

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Posted on 5 Mar 2010 at 14:55

Sometimes having the best technology doesn't mean that your product's going to fly off the shelves, as these companies learned the hard way. Here are the top 10 glorious technology failures: those products that were technically brilliant but never set the world on fire the way they should have.

10. Laserdisc

VHS (and other tape storage formats) is and was massively rubbish. Once you'd got over the excitement of being able to record, the reality set in: the picture was rubbish and degraded over time, tapes would get chewed, you had to rewind them and the sound was bad at best. In 1978 something better came along: LaserDisc (called Discovision at the time and then marketed under a range of different names).

It was the world's first optical disc storage medium and could store a much higher quality picture than VHS (its analogue video was recorded at a resolution of 440 lines for PAL discs and 425 lines for NTSC, compared to 240 lines for NTSC VHS). Later models of discs could hold digital sound, far surpassing the quality of video tapes.

Sadly, the format had its many disadvantages. The players were expensive, the 12in record-sized discs were expensive and cumbersome to use and the players were relatively noisy due to the size of motor required to spin the discs. In addition, PAL discs couldn't hold a 5.1 digital soundtrack, although NTSC discs could. Then there was the choice of recording formats: Constant Angular Velocity (CAV) stored one frame per revolution of the disc for the highest quality and the ability to jump to any specific frame by keying it into the remote's keypad, but meant that only 30 minutes of video could be stored on one side of the disc; Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) discs ditched CAV's clever playback features for 60 minutes of video. Even so, with a CLV disc a decent film was probably a couple of disc flips (unless you had a player with two lasers that could automatically switch sides).

The net result was that the format was only ever a niche one for real movie lovers that couldn't put up with the poor quality of VHS. DVD's arrival put the final nail in the format's coffin. At Expert Reviews we have found memories of it (not to mention a box of discs in the loft). There was nothing like buying a movie in this large format, with specially designed artwork, special transfers (such as those by Criterion) for the format and special features (now used by DVDs).