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Hurry Hurry Hurry before its too late?

Now that's a surprise ! Thought they'd stopped making them a decade ago. I'm not a technophile at all, but VCRs are really yesterday's recording medium in both quality and accessibility of program (let alone cost of tapes).
 
Mike Reed said:
...VCRs are really yesterday's recording medium in [...] and accessibility of program...
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Years ago we had a Grundig machine that indexed the tapes and the recordings on them.

There was a search facility where once you'd decided what you wanted to watch it would tell you the tape to select (you simply numbered their labels) and once inserted would wind the tape to the start of the programme and start playing.

It's the future - I'm telling you!
 
That's kind of sad.

They were still making 750,000 per year...wow.
What about the superior lazer disc is that still churning out big numbers.
 
Betamax was a better format/picture but Open University's take-up of VHS put the Kibosh on Beta in this country

My Sony 600 (?) was both top-of-the-range VCR and high quality sound recording medium as well. I then bought an all bells and whistles Akai VHS but never figured out the complexities of the thing; nor was I alone in that according to comments at the time.
 
Ahh, the infinite resolution of analog picture... I really miss that.
 
I took two perfectly good VCR's to the dump over a decade ago!

One of them was even clever enough to work the sky box and record from it!

How can they still be selling any?
 
Octavian said:
Ahh, the infinite resolution of analog picture... I really miss that.
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I have a few dvd copies of vhs tapes I made - God they are AWEFUL. How on earth we put up with them then. I used to have a Betamax and it broke up under its own ( plastic) weight. I think we put up with them as the old CRT tvs were not that much better? If you watch some old Doctor Who dvds you know what I mean. Wasnt there for a time some way to use them to record digital sound?
 
Yes, unlike hifi (debatable, I know), TV transmission, reception and recording quality has improved by leaps and bounds.

Mind you, the advent of the first VCRs must have seemed a eureka moment, as there was nothing before it (I believe).
 
I still use VHS machines. Recorded the two Hobbit films over the last couple of weeks.
Used to service them (and Beta and Umatic) when they were vogue.
 
Mike Reed said:
Mind you, the advent of the first VCRs must have seemed a eureka moment, as there was nothing before it (I believe).
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There were a few attempts at open reel home video recording in the early sixties all of limited success and very short lived.

The Sony U-matic was the first VCR in 1971 but rapidly became a professional only machine.

The Philips N1500 and later N1700 pre-date the VHS format but the cassettes were expensive and did`nt last very long.
 
Interesting, Barry. Considering that there were still only 3 (or was it 4?) channels on TV in the late sixties, AND that colour TV didn't make inroads until the very late sixties, there hardly seemed a need for recording..

Your mention of the 1971 machines seems to bear that out, though we were a bit behind some other countries, I remember. I bought my first colour TV (a 12" Sony) at about that time. I also bought/sold a B & O one, which was unreliable. The Sony's sharpness dropped off alarmingly after 5 years, as did successive machines until the nineties.
 
I still have one! A Panasonic "Nicam" stereo jobby. I did have a couple of others lying around but sold them off in garage sale. Just kept the one as I have fifty or so VHS music video cassettes filling a drawer.

Still remember my parant's Philips Video 2000 unit.
 
killie99 said:
My Akai VCR which I bought in 1989 did that and it cost me £600!
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VCRs were one of those things that really pre-dated the massive price falls in mass produced tech.

I remember trying to buy a basic one in the mid-90s and the cheapest one available was about £300 which was quite a lot of money back then.

20 years later and you can buy a basic DVD player for about £20 that £300 would buy you a big screen TV with recording ability built in.
 
We had a Ferguson with the clunky piano key controls. I remember thinking that we had been jet propelled into the future. It was the only thing in our house that would have survived a nuclear war. It was very well made. I bought my own Ferguson when I moved away, but the company had been sold to an overseas company and it was a shadow of the original models. I then bought a Mitsubishi machine, that I still have, and was also bulletproof. However, it has not been powered up for 10 years and it is 50/50 whether the PSU capacitors will blow if I plug it in.
 
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