Picture disc

Picture discs are gramophone (phonograph) records that show images on their playing surface, rather than being of plain black or colored vinyl.

A few seven-inch black shellac records issued by the Canadian Berliner Gramophone Company around 1900 had the "His Master's Voice" dog-and-gramophone trademark lightly etched into the surface of the playing area as an anti-piracy measure, technically qualifying them as picture discs by some definitions.

In the 1950s and throughout the rest of the vinyl era, picture postcard records, usually oversized and often featuring a garish color photograph of a tourist attraction or typical local scenery, were issued in several countries.

Some were more sturdy and well-made and they equaled or actually surpassed the audio quality of ordinary records, which were still made of a gritty shellac compound that introduced a lot of background noise.

In 1933, RCA Victor in the U.S. issued a few typical cardboard-based picture records but was unhappy with their quality and soon began making an improved type.

A rigid blank shellac core disc was sandwiched between two illustrated sheets and each side was then topped with a substantial layer of high-quality clear plastic into which the recording was pressed.

In the early 1930s the entire record industry was being devastated by a worldwide economic depression and the proliferation of the new medium of radio, which made a wide variety of music available free of charge.

With the Great Depression and World War II no longer around to interfere with such modest luxuries, the picture disc reemerged in 1946, when Tom Saffardy's Sav-Way Industries began issuing Vogue Records.

Vogues were a well-made product physically similar to RCA Victor's improved 1933 issues except that their core discs were aluminum instead of shellac.

Vogue's discs featured artwork done in the styles typical of 1940s commercial illustration and pin-up art, most of it gaudily colored, some dramatic, some humorous, some very cartoonish.

Their most popular and well-known issues resembled Vogue records in their general style of illustration and use of high-quality materials, but they were only 7 inches in diameter, had no reinforcing core disc, and sold for a much lower price.

They featured a sequence of sixteen interwoven animation frames arrayed around the center and were to be played at 78 rpm on a turntable with a short spindle, on which a small sixteen-mirrored device, a variety of the praxinoscope, was placed.