wow thanks for the link! I can't see how you can justify telling people to simply replace pinch rollers though, last time I ever heard of a repairman working on a VHS machine was 15 years ago. But thanks for setting me straight.
They even have rubber restorer: RRR250 Rubber Roller Restorer, Vcr Parts | Wagner Online Store
Maybe you can tell me what is wrong with my Sony SL-HF100 Betamax machine. It thinks that a tape is stuck in the machine permanently but I've cleaned (with 400 grit wet and dry) all of the switches on the eject mechanism. I even went back and traced the cable to the main cpu board and everything seems fine.
Only thing I've got to do is either rebuild the PSU and/or start recapping around the CPU area and/or start doing dry joints around the CPU area/board.
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I was very lucky to see it.The hand of destiny I guess. I did research on this. We had borrowed a school at Easter. We broke into the headmistresses room. Just like the BBC using people as test guinea pigs the French did the same. As the French would do they use the political friends to test it ( It's said ). They used the tele-distribution system in Paris to conduct the trial, said to be installed specially I seem to remember. I also remember the food ( HD food )!! The colour was in some ways the best ever even allowing for being the first I ever saw. Having seen excellent cinema I had a good reference. 35 mm film I suspect is better than modern HD digital cinema, The hand of destiny was with me again about 15 years ago. I was staying at the Hollywood Roosevelt and doing test cuts of vinyl at 78 just down the street. There was a TV truck. The guys let me sit in. It was the launch of Digital Cinema. I was more interested in the CRT spectrum analyzers which took more space than the CRT monitors. I seem to have a passport to anywhere like that.
This seems to say the most from Wikipedia. Analogue HD TV.
"Despite some attempts to create a color SECAM version of the 819-line system (which would have then also had the highest pre-HDTV colour signal resolution, with lines of FM encoding alternately centred on 8.82 and 8.5mhz, if arranged similarly to 625-line SECAM), France abandoned it in favor of the Europe-wide standard of 625-lines (576i50), with the final 819-line transmissions from Paris in 1984. TMC in Monaco were the last broadcasters to transmit 819-line television, closing down their System E transmitter in 1985."
405 line TV to be recorded in it's basic form needs more bandwidth than HD Cinema. OK it works differently. When trying to do it and go down cables in 1936 it's still the question to be answered. Off the top of my head. VHS 2.3 MHz, Beta 2.7 MHz, Umatic 4.5 MHz, 405 5 MHz. 625 8 MHz. 819 10 MHz, Kodachrome 12 MHz ( I know, hard to say ).
Like with analogue tape the wobble is noticeable. In both cases it can be minimal. Hard pinch rollers can be restored with methanol alcohol. Hold in your hand and apply using a cotton handkerchief. Then wash of with diluted washing up liquid followed by water. It's about 30 minutes work. The alcohol damages the top surface, on the whole it's the right sort of damage.
It seems 405 line NTSC was a US system also. The BBC did some good things which sadly it seems the US didn't take up. Pilot tone being prime ( no idea what it was called ). In the early period 405 line NTS could be demonstrated more easilly. I think it was 1953 when it was unlicensed in the US. As best I know 525 lines was a US standard since 1941. 405 would have been a backward step. All the same I would love to see a real 405 line NTSC TV. It seems the USA only got colour at the same time as the UK for the majority of people. I think the Moon shots caused a consumer boom. As the son of my old boss said yesterday maybe rolling out the network and getting agreements would have taken time. 10 years seems possible. The BBC being a bottomless pit of state spending could move fast.
I had to work in video like it or not as it was my bosses baby. It was a difficult thing not to tread on his toes. He was very good with the mechanical and hopeless at electronics, his son egged me on to join in with the lightest of touch. Stop dad spending money I seem to recall. Only now do I long to go back in time. I would shout to him NTSC is the best. Never twice the same colour refers to a lack of phase indicator. We at work designed a digital video tape. Our digital man was a complete fraud. Strangely he used his own money. I came up with the concept of data compression by looking at BBC FM encoding. I was hopelessly wrong in how to do it. 1975 I guess.
http://www.earlytelevision.org/pdf/marconi-1954-booklet-and-slides.pdf
Thanks for the info, Nigel! I didn't realize that 819 line was broadcast that late. Guess I could have seen it, with the right TV. I remember at the onset of HDTV that Francis Coppola was arguing against it. He argued that we weren't even doing NTSC right, we should mater that before moving on to a new system.
Once you get to 4K-8K, it takes a good 70mm print for the same perceived quality IMO. It's not just a numbers game (as argued on so many HT forums), it's what's actually makes it to the consumer. Having been a film and video projectionist for decades, I can testify that "If it can be done wrong, it will be done wrong."
I'd say yes, but with many caveats. It's better than standard HD if you are looking at an Eastman print or better. At that level 35mm is glorious, but it's something very few movie goers got to see. Most prints in local cinemas were several generations down and looked it. HD video doesn't have that problem.
Once you get to 4K-8K, it takes a good 70mm print for the same perceived quality IMO. It's not just a numbers game (as argued on so many HT forums), it's what's actually makes it to the consumer. Having been a film and video projectionist for decades, I can testify that "If it can be done wrong, it will be done wrong."
The really sad thing is my boss made me hate video. It's a bit like Latin. I stays.
Young people have crazy minds. I remember the guys from Sony saying they were so worn out that they slid the U-matic machines down some stairs in the boxes and all worked fine the next day. Today I would think what fools. At the time I was super impressed. To be frank U-matic underwhelmed me. I have always loved VHS as people said nasty things about it. A well set up VHS as all JVC's were, seemed to beat Beta and sometimes U-matic. My boss spent his life setting up Sony's ( I remember him getting 5.5 MHz only to have 4 MHz soon afterwards, we had simple test tapes ). Sony like Linn made the agent feel honored to do it. If you look at the overall specs of VHS and Beta I fail to understand this Beta is better idea. Lets be frank both were poor by even 405 line standards. Like a Big Mac we can enjoy it.
Young people have crazy minds. I remember the guys from Sony saying they were so worn out that they slid the U-matic machines down some stairs in the boxes and all worked fine the next day. Today I would think what fools. At the time I was super impressed. To be frank U-matic underwhelmed me. I have always loved VHS as people said nasty things about it. A well set up VHS as all JVC's were, seemed to beat Beta and sometimes U-matic. My boss spent his life setting up Sony's ( I remember him getting 5.5 MHz only to have 4 MHz soon afterwards, we had simple test tapes ). Sony like Linn made the agent feel honored to do it. If you look at the overall specs of VHS and Beta I fail to understand this Beta is better idea. Lets be frank both were poor by even 405 line standards. Like a Big Mac we can enjoy it.
Color TV was sporadically tested in the US in several formats in the early 1950's. NTSC color came somewhere in the mid 50's.
As a kid I collected old radios and fixed them. I can't remember a time when I didn't have my own (tube) radio. I tinkered with dead TV sets too, and had my own TV by age 10 or so, and kept upgrading whenever I could find a better one that I could fix.
Color TV wasn't so popular in the early 60's, so finding dead ones in the trash was not happening. Sometime around 1965 I found a dead RCA color TV. It turned out to be beyond economical repair for a 13 year old kid because the metal bell CRT had gone to air. I robbed it for parts and made an awesome guitar amp with that huge power transformer. I now know it to have been a CTC-5 chassis made in 1956. I know that there was a CTC-4 made in 1955.
In 1967 I would enter a vocational high school that had a 3 year electronics program. This is where I learned how to melt tubes and built some extreme electronics like a Tesla coil taller than myself. It was based on the "Big TC" that graced the cover of Popular Electronics magazine in July 1964.
The electronics class had a huge room full of electronics that had been donated to the public school for tax purposes, with new stuff coming weekly. They had a policy that a student could claim something, fix it, write a report or otherwise document or demonstrate the repair to other students and the repaired object became yours. I acquired a Baldwin organ that way.
Most of the "junk" was just used for parts. There were lots of TV's and I helped many students fix up a dead one for their personal projects. While most high school kids worked after school pumping gas or flipping burgers, I fixed TV's in a local shop. One of the "magic tricks" the boss did for customers was "color purification," a standard degausing process, but people were enthralled by the swirling colors, and swore it made the picture better.
One day in 1968 a truck arrived, and there it was, a huge Emerson color TV. It had a large wooden cabinet and was mostly intact. It had been made by RCA for Emerson in 1957, and was technically superior to RCA's own TV's of the time. Unfortunately the CRT was also dead, but I claimed it and set my goals to have that thing working before I graduated high school.
I would achieve that goal with a used CRT that had the creeping crud around the edges (a fungus common in south Florida that grew between the CRT face and the bonded safety glass).
Even in 1969 most of the programming broadcast was still black and white. The only color shows that I remember were the network news broadcasts and Disney's Wonderful World of Color, broadcast on NBC featuring the NBC peacock unfolding it's tail in color at the start of each show.
I had the only working color TV in the neighborhood when the "live from the moon" color broadcast occurred. There were about 20 people gathered in my bedroom in the middle of the night to watch it.
As a kid I collected old radios and fixed them. I can't remember a time when I didn't have my own (tube) radio. I tinkered with dead TV sets too, and had my own TV by age 10 or so, and kept upgrading whenever I could find a better one that I could fix.
Color TV wasn't so popular in the early 60's, so finding dead ones in the trash was not happening. Sometime around 1965 I found a dead RCA color TV. It turned out to be beyond economical repair for a 13 year old kid because the metal bell CRT had gone to air. I robbed it for parts and made an awesome guitar amp with that huge power transformer. I now know it to have been a CTC-5 chassis made in 1956. I know that there was a CTC-4 made in 1955.
In 1967 I would enter a vocational high school that had a 3 year electronics program. This is where I learned how to melt tubes and built some extreme electronics like a Tesla coil taller than myself. It was based on the "Big TC" that graced the cover of Popular Electronics magazine in July 1964.
The electronics class had a huge room full of electronics that had been donated to the public school for tax purposes, with new stuff coming weekly. They had a policy that a student could claim something, fix it, write a report or otherwise document or demonstrate the repair to other students and the repaired object became yours. I acquired a Baldwin organ that way.
Most of the "junk" was just used for parts. There were lots of TV's and I helped many students fix up a dead one for their personal projects. While most high school kids worked after school pumping gas or flipping burgers, I fixed TV's in a local shop. One of the "magic tricks" the boss did for customers was "color purification," a standard degausing process, but people were enthralled by the swirling colors, and swore it made the picture better.
One day in 1968 a truck arrived, and there it was, a huge Emerson color TV. It had a large wooden cabinet and was mostly intact. It had been made by RCA for Emerson in 1957, and was technically superior to RCA's own TV's of the time. Unfortunately the CRT was also dead, but I claimed it and set my goals to have that thing working before I graduated high school.
I would achieve that goal with a used CRT that had the creeping crud around the edges (a fungus common in south Florida that grew between the CRT face and the bonded safety glass).
Even in 1969 most of the programming broadcast was still black and white. The only color shows that I remember were the network news broadcasts and Disney's Wonderful World of Color, broadcast on NBC featuring the NBC peacock unfolding it's tail in color at the start of each show.
I had the only working color TV in the neighborhood when the "live from the moon" color broadcast occurred. There were about 20 people gathered in my bedroom in the middle of the night to watch it.
Attachments
You are welcome....WES are the goto supplier for domestic equipment replacement parts.
I serviced a couple of VHS machines a few months ago, ten years for Beta.
A new pinch roller ensures that tapes are safe from damage until the next servicing.
Your current PR is old and will have hardened and is likely worn....both conditions cause tape walking and tape edge damage.
You have the link...just get a new one.
For printers yes, vcr NO....and more than twice the price of a new PR.
What does "It thinks that a tape is stuck in the machine permanently" mean.
Keep carborundum grit right out of the equation, and NEVER use on switch contacts.
That is the very last thing to do just yet, keep your soldering iron right away for now.
Dan.
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U-Matic wasn't great, but it sure was easier to use than 1" tape.
I suspect it was as good as it was because the decks were well made. At work we had a Sony SVO-9800 S-VHS deck. That thing rocked! It even made rented VHS tapes look decent. If you went right from camera to S-VHS is was remarkably good. Not BetaSP II good, but closer than you might think. If you pay $7000 for a VHS deck, it ought to look good, and it did. ($10K in current dollars). I concluded that much of the limitations of VHS were not due to the format, but the equipment. We learned that with good cassette decks, too.
There is a "Cassette inside" light on the front of the VCR which blinks. The machine responds only to the eject button and no other button besides the power button.
The machine goes through the motions of ejecting a tape but once finished it instantly goes back to looping the tape up around the head again as if it thinks the tape failed to eject.
All of the switches were cleaned by me and were tested with a multimeter for 000.1 ohms and check ok.
There is a slight sqealing noise coming from the PSU, definatley from the psu probably from the transformer, I'm assuming its not operating at the correct frequency and the switching transistors/power supply regulator and capacitors need replacing.
Squealing from an old style switcher is a constant startup / shutdown condition usually caused by an overload. Still could be a shorted cap.
My experience was related to fixing old school PC power supplies in the 286 / 386 days. About the heydey of VHS machines. The culprit was usually a bad diode. One side of a dual diode would short causing the power supply to cycle on and off at a KHz rate making the squeal.
A switching transistor will almost always fail to a short blowing the mains fuse. Ditto a cap in the switching circuit.
The "tape grabbing" mechanism could be mechanically binding or jammed causing an overcurrent in one of the motors. The power supply might just be designed to shut down / cycle in this case to avoid seriously broken stuff or smoking motors. Customers really detest smoking electronics.
My dad took a job with Dixie Electronics in West Columbia SC around 1965. In 1966 he brought home a Setchell Carlson (tube based) color TV that cost around $500 or $600 at the time. That was a HUGE amount of money.
It had sub chassis for the various sections of the IF, RF, sync separator, video, audio, etc.
That was the first color TV we had, and I ended up getting it when I went to college (after a stint in the NAVY) in 1976 I had that TV until 1981 when I moved to Tennessee.
The console TVs back then were monsters.
It had sub chassis for the various sections of the IF, RF, sync separator, video, audio, etc.
That was the first color TV we had, and I ended up getting it when I went to college (after a stint in the NAVY) in 1976 I had that TV until 1981 when I moved to Tennessee.
The console TVs back then were monsters.
That's pretty early, everyone I knew at the time had B&W. You must have liked it, if you kept it so long.
I think I first saw color TV in about 1967. Local Sears store had a wall of them. The picture on one had a blue tint, another magenta, another green, some of them pink tint. Horrible. I went away scratching my head and wondering why all the fuss about these new color TVs.
I envy you guys who had fathers who were into toys. I spent many years watching a console TV that was essentially broken, intermittently going into a pink hue with red lines across the screen. Without going too deep into psychoanalysis let's just say my dad was the type to prefer cursing the darkness over lighting a candle.
Could be multiple causes.
Does the tape fully load to the play position ?....does it play/ff/rew ?.
Does the tape fully load back into the cassette during eject sequence ?.
Does the cassette attempt to raise up ?.
If the tape does raise up how far through the loading carriage eject sequence does the cassette get to ?.
Ok.
First job is to get the cassette out, you may have to remove the mech so that you can manually rotate motors and fully eject the cassette....be sure that the tape mech and the loading carriage are fully to their end (unloaded) positions.
While you have the mech out closely inspect for defects (cracks) in plastic gears, check that spring loaded arms and guides return to correct positions (arms can seize onto shafts due to emulsified grease/lubricant).
Once this is done, refit the mech, apply power and see what happens....do not try inserting the tape yet.
If the system resets correctly and powers up, check other functions....connect a monitor and look for noise bars/sweeps etc on on RF of Aux inputs.
Tell me what you find and we can go from there.
Dan.
Mainly, the noise reduction defaults will do that (you need to adjust the setting).
Also, compression on anamorphic pixels will be blurry (you need to encode to square pixels).
And, compression reduces quality if/when the output is same size as the original (you need to up-size with lazcos).
It takes all 3 settings used together, to make an archive quality MP4.
And, it may be necessary to find some software that has the settings.
My dad was in the Air Force and was stationed in Constantina Spain ( in 1959) at the 872nd AC&W Squadron (Radar). We didn't come back to the USA until late 1963.
When we returned we went to stay with his sister Millicent in PA, up near the King of Prussia area for a couple of weeks while our belongings were coming by ship.
Any way, I remember one night Aunt Miss (Millicent) saying there was going to be a special show on TV that night. (I'm 12) The show comes on and it is nothing great, B&W. Intro to Wizard of Oz, bata, bing.
My brothers and sister had never seen color TV before that night. In fact we hadn't seen TV for four years while over seas. When the image started shifting into color I and my brothers and sister freaked out.
When we returned we went to stay with his sister Millicent in PA, up near the King of Prussia area for a couple of weeks while our belongings were coming by ship.
Any way, I remember one night Aunt Miss (Millicent) saying there was going to be a special show on TV that night. (I'm 12) The show comes on and it is nothing great, B&W. Intro to Wizard of Oz, bata, bing.
My brothers and sister had never seen color TV before that night. In fact we hadn't seen TV for four years while over seas. When the image started shifting into color I and my brothers and sister freaked out.
Hang on lets get one thing straight. There is no tape in there. The vcr is empty. The VCR THINKS there is a tape in there.
Thanks for your help too in advance.
I also don't own a Betamax cassette tape, yet. I bought the machine first off ebay 2nd hand and I've yet to get a tape for it, last time I had a Betamax tape around was 15 years ago. I'll get myself a Betamax tape sometime this week or next week though to use as a test tape.
IF there was a tape in there. Imaginary tape here. Yes it fully loads to the play position, no it doesn't respond to play/ff/rew. "Cassette inside" light just blinks like its a Do Not Walk street light.
The tape mechanism thinks that it is loading a tape back into the cassette whenever I hit Eject and it thinks that its loading a tape onto the head after it thinks its finished loading the tape into the cassette.
No. This machine still thinks that it has a tape in there despite the eject mechanism being in the fully ejected and up position.
There is nothing wrong with the eject mechanism, I've already gone through all of the mechanics and all of the gears and roller bearings have been checked and oiled.
This guy showed me how: YouTube
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U-Matic wasn't great, but it sure was easier to use than 1" tape.
I suspect it was as good as it was because the decks were well made. At work we had a Sony SVO-9800 S-VHS deck. That thing rocked! It even made rented VHS tapes look decent. If you went right from camera to S-VHS is was remarkably good. Not BetaSP II good, but closer than you might think. If you pay $7000 for a VHS deck, it ought to look good, and it did. ($10K in current dollars). I concluded that much of the limitations of VHS were not due to the format, but the equipment. We learned that with good cassette decks, too.
You are exactly right. The 1" machine were very easy to use. We had a surprising amount of Sony open real tape on the shelf. Sony directed people to us long after no one had them, we did. Williams F1 bought loads of U-matic tape and won races then. Harwell bough open reel. My boss helped with Zeta and later Jet. To film the plasma was very hard. Emerich had during the war been involved in languages to keep it simple. For Jet he volunteered to translate English to German. The German engineers claimed not to understand Zeta. It seems genuinely, though good English speakers the fine details were lost. My boss as a highly trained engineer ( Vienna 1938 ) could do detail. It could be Jet being here in Oxfordshire is down to him. The German side were not convinced we should have it.
Just reading up on 625 line PAL. It was stated 5.5 MHz was a good minimum standard. After 1972 the quality of broadcast went down. A live horse race proved it, trivial subject in near HD. U-matic was prized by all as a use and forget format. The argument was NTSC was worse. Not really. NTSC wasn't ideal for how the USA needed it to be. The degradation between studio and user was considerable.
A BBC paper that should have been called " How we got to where we are " was very interesting. 405 NTSC was seen as a triumph. Both in monochrome and colour receivers over 18 inch showed the lines. One has to realize 405 is not vastly less than 525 ( USA ). Sony's KV 1800 years later was a dream TV which would have served well. It is rumoured the UK ones were not PAL and made a false NTSC picture. The 90 degrees tube was fabulous. It's the mythical Trinitron and best non professional CRT I ever saw. The BBC guy said colour was always considered too greedy of bandwidth. NTSC proved a Quart could be poured into a pint pot and hardly a drop lost. I really like that.
One of the more fascination parts of the report was the for local relays 1 to 2 watts was all that was possible using semiconductors, 10 watts would be ideal ( 1990, ours 5 watts ). Klystrons at 21 KV class A PP used in the main ones ( 40 % efficient ). Cooling reliability seen as a big issue. This was 1970.
It is said the UK financed VHS. Unlike Europe we were not on cable TV ( Belgium is the one I knew ). We at best had 4 TV channels. Also because TV had never been very reliable renting was common even when reliable. One of the rental companies also owned the brand Ferguson. Radio Rentals I suspect was the name of their chain ( DER was another ). Whatever else was wrong with RR they had a team of highly trained engineers. BRC ( British Radio Corp ) as the company was called asked Sony to have Beta. A firm no way from Sony. JVC who were the underdogs said yes. To get the price BRC had to do final quality control on Ferguson VHS. JVC chickened out and did it anyway and didn't tell BRC. BRC did do it. These were the best aligned machines ever. My lifelong friend Paul Stewart confirms this story is true as he and Kurt Lowe of JVC UK agreed the deal. I had one of the JVC badged machines, it was superb. It also was low cost. Paul thinks the 1000's of VHS used in the UK nearly killed Sony and helped JVC go forward. BTW, most JVC things should be looked at as possible treasures. DD turntables for example.
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