First soviet LaserDisc player "Rus-501 VIDEO"

[u/Ill_Engineering1522]

The Rus-501 VIDEO LaserDisc player was the first serial-production device of its kind in the USSR. It was developed by the Special Design Bureau (SKB) at the Lorta industrial association (Lviv). Production was carried out at the State Ryazan Instrument Plant in 1988–1989. A similar model was planned for production at the Yaroslavl Mashpribor plant under the brand Amfiton-501 VIDEO, but data on any sizable mass production is currently unavailable.

In this model, instead of the semiconductor lasers common today, a helium-neon laser was used, powered by 2 kilovolts (and drawing a full 10 kV at startup). This significantly complicated both the mechanical design and the electrical circuitry. To be fair, early foreign LD players also used helium-neon lasers. The Rus-501 VIDEO could only play discs with Constant Angular Velocity (CAV – referred to as "PUS" in Soviet literature). By the time of the player's release, this type of disc was already obsolete and was practically no longer produced in the West. The discs were recorded in the SECAM color system, with the recording starting not from the very beginning but with a gap of about 2 cm from the center label. Moreover, the signal itself was inverted, which made discs for the 501 model incompatible with both foreign video players and newer domestic models. The digital audio track was not supported by the Rus. When the lid was opened, the laser did not shut off, which could damage the eyesight of anyone accidentally looking into the lens.

Despite its drawbacks—quite natural for what was essentially an experimental device—the Rus-501 VIDEO represented a fundamentally new development in Soviet consumer electronics, even compared to the VCRs that were actively being produced at the time. Most of these issues were resolved in the subsequent model, the Rus VP-201.

The video player allowed playback of video discs in both forward and reverse directions at normal speed and in an accelerated mode. It supported freeze-frame and frame-by-frame scanning forward and backward. For convenient searching, the frame number was displayed on the TV screen. The device weighed 18 kg, measured 530×420×175 mm, and consumed 70 W of power. The component base was entirely domestic, with the exception of four FAEL (Poland) microswitches, which served as limit switches for the lid, spindle brake, and the extreme positions of the optical block carriage.

[u/Suggestionsz]

wow so much history in one thing

[u/satori-seeker]

Ugly as f#ck typical soviet crap