Are you saying that with the carriage up and at ejected position that the mech goes into play mode position ?.
Dan.
correct. as if it thinks there is tape there wrapped around the head, as if its hallucinating a tape in the machine despite the eject mechanism being in the fully ejected position. As soon as you hit the eject button it goes into play position and feeds the tape around the head.
When you power on the machine from a cold start the very first thing that it does is that the left spindle begins to spin as if it is winding the tape back into the cartridge then it just sits there and blinks its "Cassette Inside" light waiting for user input. The clock and power light is lit and I can change channels but that is about it. The only thing that I can do is hit the eject button which then results in the vcr going through the motions of winding the tape by winding it around the head.
It then assumes that it has failed to eject the phantom tape and unwinds the tape back around the head and into the tape.
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Heh the solenoid was working. It just wasn't strong enough to engage properly and I managed to make the wrong erreronous assumption that Sony wouldn't be stupid enough to stick a really long pin into the solenoid bullet/shaft to make it trip a different mechanism.
So I cut off a piece of the pin so that it would clear the plastic piece which it was hitting and preventing it to stop thinking that there was a cassette in the machine. I assumed that someone had jammed a new pin into the solenoid pin hole.
But no apparently a pin sticking out the side of a solenoid and roughly hitting a piece of plastic by design and pushing against a spring is a part of the grand majesty of the design geniuses at Sony.
The "grand design" of the "geniuses" at Sony is circled in red on the attached image below. You can just make out the pin popping up and covering the closer-to-you-side of the plastic mechanism which moves the arm immediatley above it. The weak solenoid (psu issues?) was what was giving me the problems in the first place.
YouTube
Video has the same brass-type mechanism as mine. Very very nasty and cheap almost caveman or Indian roadside machinist like.
Doing that has just made things worse now the machine continually loads and unloads a tape onto the head.
I'm getting the impression that the frontloader betamaxes are cheap rubbish garbage deserving only of melting down into lava. I will have to drill out the old pin and replace it with a new one before I can continue any further.
But hey at least I fixed the "Cassette inside" problem. I would recommend anyone who is into archiving Betamax tapes to do your research and get a reliable top loader.
So I cut off a piece of the pin so that it would clear the plastic piece which it was hitting and preventing it to stop thinking that there was a cassette in the machine. I assumed that someone had jammed a new pin into the solenoid pin hole.
But no apparently a pin sticking out the side of a solenoid and roughly hitting a piece of plastic by design and pushing against a spring is a part of the grand majesty of the design geniuses at Sony.
The "grand design" of the "geniuses" at Sony is circled in red on the attached image below. You can just make out the pin popping up and covering the closer-to-you-side of the plastic mechanism which moves the arm immediatley above it. The weak solenoid (psu issues?) was what was giving me the problems in the first place.
YouTube
Video has the same brass-type mechanism as mine. Very very nasty and cheap almost caveman or Indian roadside machinist like.
Doing that has just made things worse now the machine continually loads and unloads a tape onto the head.
I'm getting the impression that the frontloader betamaxes are cheap rubbish garbage deserving only of melting down into lava. I will have to drill out the old pin and replace it with a new one before I can continue any further.
But hey at least I fixed the "Cassette inside" problem. I would recommend anyone who is into archiving Betamax tapes to do your research and get a reliable top loader.
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Think I'll start collecting the old Sanyo VTC series of Betacord VCRs. Mainly because they go for only $20-$50 on ebay AND they only need a new belt kit put through them to get them working.
That is basically all I had as a teenager, nothing but top loaders. And most of them worked.
The Sony Betamax VCR's are usually always $400 in working condition. Most likely sold by scrappies looking to make money.
That is basically all I had as a teenager, nothing but top loaders. And most of them worked.
The Sony Betamax VCR's are usually always $400 in working condition. Most likely sold by scrappies looking to make money.
Or Laserdisc to S-VHS. A viable "analog archival" alternative to Laserdisc would be S-VHS or Betacam SP. A Professional S-VHS machine is on sale on ebay australia for about $350 and I nearly bought it.
Provided you didn't want to go through the hassle of burning Bluray Discs of carefully mastered codec copies of your Laserdiscs.
It makes perfect financial sense, you don't have to buy a powerful computer or a bluray disc burner or even a large hard drive for temporary storage. Just the VCR and blank high quality TDK chromium tapes.
It doesn't make perfect futureproofing sense though unless you consider the fact that Bluray itself is going to die too. Best bet would be then to archive the files in an archival-tuned codec onto computer hard drives.
oh but wait, SATA is going to be obsolete soon too.... and hard drives don't last forever, better back it up onto LTO-6 tape....
Oh wait. LTO tape won't be around forever either, and the drives will just continue to go up in price, which means an ever increasing and continual cost to the archiving process, continually having to check if a drive or computer that can read it (one with a SAS controller card that works) that works and having to continually find a bargain on eBay for a second hand used LTO-6 drive.... Then migrating the contents of one tape generation to another tape generation 2 generations ahead minimum.
Guess I had better keep a copy of Windows 10 around just in case they decide to depreciate the drivers and not make them work on Windows 11. Who knows what the computer scene will be like in another 20 years time.
Or I could just simply get a Betacam SP deck and archive everything to that. Or keep buying S-VHS and Betacam SP machines and archive to that. Who knows.
Optical formats have proven themselves to be pretty durable in terms of obsolescence, so has tape, and its not like you would ever find a shortage of a DVD player anytime soon in the next 50 years or so. But DVD is pretty obsolete now, the bitrate isn't high enough, which leaves us with Bluray.
If I were a betting man I would be archiving things to Bluray and using Archival-grade 50 year discs. There are a massive amount of Bluray players available out there right now. Only because tape's future is on shaky ground.
Or maybe even a 1,000 year M-DISC BD-XL (100GB capacity), could store at least 6x movies in an extremely high bitrate with that amount of space.
Which means that I need to see if that is a viable method of archiving D1 analog video and audio.
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mmm.. S-VHS would be pretty good I guess. I think digitizing content and archiving it onto LTO is a safe bet though at least for the next 40 years.
M-DISC - Wikipedia
M-DISC is out of the question, the company has gone bankrupt as of 2016 but another company has taken over manufacturing M-DISCS, and the final nail in the coffin is that independent testing has shown that the discs change composition and degrade in a 1,000 hour test at 90 degrees centigrade... terrible performance for an archival grade disc.
M-DISC - Wikipedia
M-DISC is out of the question, the company has gone bankrupt as of 2016 but another company has taken over manufacturing M-DISCS, and the final nail in the coffin is that independent testing has shown that the discs change composition and degrade in a 1,000 hour test at 90 degrees centigrade... terrible performance for an archival grade disc.
Near the end of analogue TV came the remarkable VHS hi fi machines that sold in the UK for less than £80. I was told they were made by Funai. Unlike the expensive Sony's they seemed totally reliable. I recently found a Matsui brand version as sold by our largest retailer, Whilst not reaching the highest of high definition they were 80% as good as VHS can be. Wow and flutter being better than one would imagine.
Sometimes when the pinch roller is in perfect condition various things can cause similar problems. In the Sony service kit was a mechanical tension test cassette working like a torque wrench indicator. Various devices set the tension make to make. If you are very careful you can set these devices by trying slack and tight. Sometimes there was no adjustment. If more tension required adding a washers or whatever could work. Reversing or swapping parts can work.
Sometimes when the pinch roller is in perfect condition various things can cause similar problems. In the Sony service kit was a mechanical tension test cassette working like a torque wrench indicator. Various devices set the tension make to make. If you are very careful you can set these devices by trying slack and tight. Sometimes there was no adjustment. If more tension required adding a washers or whatever could work. Reversing or swapping parts can work.
The last of the VHS machines were masterful in terms of economical mass producibility and servicability, and with LSI signal processing and routing performance was remarkably good.
Those Funai type decks, although lightweight and relatively simple, did work very well and reliably, and mechanical adjustments did not drift.
Main faults were worn pinch roller and increased back tension due to wear (plastic powder embedding into back tension band), mode switch oxidised contacts and sticking arms due to dead grease.
Back in the day you could perform a repair, full clean, lube and adjustment in 30 minutes on this class of machine, simply not possible with earlier generation machines.
Dan.
Those Funai type decks, although lightweight and relatively simple, did work very well and reliably, and mechanical adjustments did not drift.
Main faults were worn pinch roller and increased back tension due to wear (plastic powder embedding into back tension band), mode switch oxidised contacts and sticking arms due to dead grease.
Back in the day you could perform a repair, full clean, lube and adjustment in 30 minutes on this class of machine, simply not possible with earlier generation machines.
Dan.
Suit yourself. I wasn't blaming my tools I was blaming the patient. Was concerned about the prodigious amount of fragile plastic (soon to be crack-prone) that makes up the innards of a Sony SL-HF100. And the Sony SL-HF100 which I'm already in debt to by $120 and its got nothing to show for itself so far.
My unit arrived with at least 3 items cracked that I had to patch up with superglue and the machine was covered inside with the iron flakings of a tape . I'm sure that other units if aren't treated so badly won't have such an issue but I'm sure that in time they will develop an issue and if not serviced properly will end up in the bin.
A Sanyo VTC-9300 on the other hand, which I just recently picked up two of them for $20 and $50 off ebay, and am currently getting them delivered to my door via packsend.com.au. Are mostly filled with metal components inside. And the only difference between the old heavyweight champion Sanyo's and the more modern Sony's is that the more modern Sony's have a 4 head drum, but both on paper produce 270 TVL. And 90% of pre-recorded Betamax content out there is recorded in Mono.
And yes I did blame myself for cutting off a pin, which I can easily replace. But it looked so ODD! and out of place. It looked like it was catching on a piece of plastic and preventing the solenoid from fully engaging. But now I know and realise that it was all just a part of the majesty that is Sony engineering on the budget-side of Betamax in the 90s when they knew they had already lost the format war.
But that doesn't preclude the fact that they did produce some amazingly well built machines, but I wouldn't recommend just going out there and spending $400-$1000 on any old Sony deck on eBay just so that you can get into the Betamax format again. that would be a waste of everyones money and time.
Take the Sony SL-F1 for example, excellent innards, I can personally vouch for that. Another good example is the Sony SL-2500. Both units which have dual motors and can deal with sticky Betamax tapes a lot better. SL-C9 also good: Betamax PALsite: SL-C9 : Overview
YouTube
Rick Thomas will back me up on this in the video above.
You can spend big on getting a Sony Betamax deck or you can go retro and get a bunch of cheap Sanyo VTC VCRs that look like this inside:
YouTube
YouTube
For only $20 a month you can adopt a Sanyo Betacord VCR today and save them from the heartbreak of being a scrappie's lunch.
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Ok apparently the late model Betamax decks with the 711B3 chassis are the ones to go for if you are into buying a second hand Sony Betamax deck.
YouTube
The one in the video is the SL-330 which was manufactured in 1988.
There are a few Betamax lists around but this is the best list that I've found so far:
Sony List
There is no way for me to compare model and chassis numbers so I cannot advise anyone on which paticular models have which chassis and which ones you should avoid. Yet. Hopefully at some point in the future I will be able to.
YouTube
The one in the video is the SL-330 which was manufactured in 1988.
There are a few Betamax lists around but this is the best list that I've found so far:
Sony List
There is no way for me to compare model and chassis numbers so I cannot advise anyone on which paticular models have which chassis and which ones you should avoid. Yet. Hopefully at some point in the future I will be able to.
It's fun to see what the current unloved consumer tech is. A tour of local thrift and charity shops will show you.
For the past few years it's been VCRs and portable CRT TVs in abundance. I don't see those any more. Now it's stacks of of cheap DVD players, and many not-so-cheap CD carousel players. A few portable CD players. Still see some wifi routers and ethernet switches, a few computer speakers. But mostly - optical playback is the new unloved tech.
For the past few years it's been VCRs and portable CRT TVs in abundance. I don't see those any more. Now it's stacks of of cheap DVD players, and many not-so-cheap CD carousel players. A few portable CD players. Still see some wifi routers and ethernet switches, a few computer speakers. But mostly - optical playback is the new unloved tech.
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