Give me a laser stylus that doesn’t wear out the record surface - oh and make it under $100 - and I’ll buy records again.
An optical mouse is basically a camera-light system that rapidly takes tiny pictures of the size of the area of the optical window underneath the mouse, hundreds to thousands of times each second, to detect motion. I guess the same system could be tweaked to optically read records.
Did I just give out a patent-worthy idea? :^)