Did you love Laserdisc? Were you bonkers over Betamax? Do you cry yourself to sleep because BeOS never hit the big time? Fret no more -- superdork Captain Tech is here to travel back in time and save the format losers that should have triumphed.
2. Betamax
3. Laserdisc
4. 8-track
5. High-definition audio
7. BeOS
8. DTS
9. Atari ST
10. What life would be like
What life would be like
So what would life be like if Captain Tech's lengthy trip through time had revived some of the best technology in the history of mankind?
Watching movies would be an amazing experience. Betamax would be back, so we'd all have smaller, compact tapes and superior recording quality. Laserdisc was also rescued, so we get a fantastic home-cinema experience too.
As Captain Tech would have rescued us from lower bit-rate Dolby Digital, DTS surround sound would be on on every amp. Our ears would be bathed in glorious sound from every corner of the room, but there'd also be high-definition audio, so our music would be the very best quality.
His meddling with the fabric of time would also have yielded a surprising result. The success of BeOS and its sale to Apple computer would mean that Steve Jobs never returned to the company, meaning there is no iPod in this alternate reality. Instead, everyone either has a MiniDisc player or an oddly shaped Creative MP3 player.
Captain Tech has truly saved the day. The formats we thought were dead have been resurrected and no more do we have to suffer the cheaper mass-market alternative. In our brightly coloured minds, anyway.
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canberra_photographer
30/12/2007 01:16 AM
Doesn't wear out over time? Laserdisc was netoriuous for so called "laser rot" and the size and materials used meant that discs were easily scratched. I'll take VHS anyday, though I would have prefered beta!
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canberra_photographer
30/12/2007 01:32 AM
DTS a failure, every news Special Edition DVD has DTS from the major studios. They remastered the entire James Bond series into DTS and proudly make it a selling point. DTS is a success. MiniDisc over iPod, the iPod can hold uncompressed WAV audio, MP3, AAC. MD hold... ATRAC... and... well nothing else, just heavily compressed ATRAC. DTS is the only things in this list deserving of being saved. Even high def audio isn't. The world is moving towards digital content delivery through the internet.
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abuska
30/12/2007 07:07 PM
absolutely brilliant article guys.. thankyou
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Peterk
04/01/2008 10:59 AM
Our friend from the ACT is not aware of Hi-MD introduced in 2003/4. 1 gb minidiscs that could record many hours of music (highly compressed) and be used for jpeg, word and other comptuer files. ATRAC still sounds far superior to MP3
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canberra_photographer
11/01/2008 09:56 AM
An iPod is way better than those mini disc players because u would have to carry those mini-discs everywhere, and the iPod stores everything on its hard disk.
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two-ears-good,four-ears-better
29/05/2008 06:33 PM
Comparing iPod with Mini-disc is not really the point. The two are different products for different purposes. Can you do high-quality field recordings with an iPod? I doubt it. OTOH for the convenience of carrying around a great deal of reasonable quality music just to listen to, there are many MP3 hard-disc players around (not *just* iPod, let's remember!) which offer a more compact solution than Mini-disc. There are many other issues like battery life, battery replacement, add-ons, etc, etc. Neither technology wins on all points.
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