BETAMAX had a simple mechanism. 1 moving part and a couple of gears to turn it. Then they complicated it.

@@12voltvids Yeah, I don't really know. In my country we had nothing and then VCRs came to be. I encountered literally 2 Betamaxes in my whole life and I am almost 40.

That sounds about right

Already sold one.

I was actually surprised that it lasted till 2016 myself. By then all the analog broadcasts were long gone. One thing I remember was that in the 1980s the Sony guys are already talking about flash-based recording and getting a movie on an SD card that was going to eliminate all videotape now this is back in the 1980s this took a while to come to fruition because well video compression needed to material a lot from what they had back then but they were on the right track.

They were one of the more reliable machines. People didn't like them because they were not panasonic, jvc, Sony, Hitachi or rca branded.

Same way as audio, just smaller. A ferrite core with a coil of wire. Perhaps tomorrow I will dig one out and we can look at it under a microscope.

They made them through to 2016. I have a couple toshiba dvd recorder/ vhs from 2012.

It was

Pretty much every vcr from the mid 2000 were all Funai because they were the last company making vhs. By this point the only vcrs that Sony made were betacam format for broadcast. Even they went out of production. In the 20teens. Beta format (not consumer betamax) had the longest run when you consider all the sub formats all based on the beta cassette. (Betacam, betacam sp, digibeta, betacam sx, HDBetacam ect.)

I won't do mail order. If a customers machine needs a part that I can't source locally, I give them the part number and the web site and tell them to order the part and bring it to me once it arrives. I was burned a few years ago on shipping charges that after I ordered the part and fixed it the customer refused to pick up because of the shipping charges for the parts. So now my policy is customer orders the parts or pays me in advance in cash to order parts in. If s second part I missed is needed they pay again. 9 out of 10 tones as soon as they find out that the part costs 1.59 and the shipping is 30.00 they just abandon it. Tell me to scrap it or they cone and collect it. No money in repairs. Everything is getting that way.

@@12voltvids This is the only way to deal with oredering special parts by mailorder. Here in the UK postage of small parts is not too bad, but many suppliers have a minimum order and if your order is below it, they hammer you with a small order surcharge. Ordering spares from other parts of the world is very expensive as you have to use airmail then pay import fees plus VAT making most repairs too expensive. This is how i now have a room full of unrepaired gear that the customers told me to scrap it. If i take a load of them to the recycling they charge me just to dispose of them ! We are now in a no win era, with many good items scrapped all because the same expensive part fails on all of them.

Here we don't have to deal with taxes and import fees on small parts however most of these distributors will not use USPS to ship Parts because either they have a contract with fedex or UPS or they don't have the staff to take them to the Post Office and mail them. It's easier to click a mouse button have your printer print out a waybill stick it to the package and a few hours later a truck arrives and picks up the packages this is how these parts companies operate it's cheaper for them to ship by FedEx or UPS the problem is when parts are shipped by FedEx or UPS FedEx are UPS being a private company will not do the processing for free they charge you $37 typically to check a couple boxes on a farm And click submit. For example FedEx charges $25 to process the paperwork that $25 is subject to JST Goods and Services Tax so now you have to pay tax on the $25 processing fee which is a couple dollars now because they are going to loan you that $2.50 they can now charge you alone fee of $10 so apart that should have had 0 taxes applied now has a $37.50 fee added to it which has to be passed on to the customer and of course if you were the customer if I was the customer and someone repairing something said you're a repairs $85 for parts and labor but there's a 3750 fee for the shipping to get the part here I'd be telling them to stuff it too. I told a local restaurant that I used to visit once a week had a good meal there but all of a sudden the item that I always ordered was no longer available they removed it from the menu but they said they could special order it for me but it was gonna be a $5 surcharge to get the same thing that I had gotten the week before so I said to them sorry you've just priced yourself out of what I'm prepared to pay and I haven't gone back since. Will they go out of business while I guess have enough people take the same attitude as me that you've priced yourself out of what I consider to be an affordable price I'm going to go somewhere else they will end up business and it's unfortunate but this is the way it is sometimes and I understand that some people will just accept this and just pay it and go on but a lot of us won't and a lot of my customers won't. My garage is full of unrepaired equipment because either the cost or repair is too high or parts are not available locally and owner doesn't want to pay the price of importing parts or stuff is fixed and customer went radio silent after I repaired item and contacted them it was done. At least I don't have to pay to dispose of the equipment because we have free recycling. When you buy anything new, be it a battery, bottle of soda, light bulb or TV there is a fee tagging from 0.02 to 50.00 to cover the cost to recycle it at end of life. So we just take the junk to the recycle center and they take care of it for us.

@@12voltvids I used to order a lot of laserdisc spares from Pioneer in Japan, they offered Japan Post as a shipping option, if you paid for express airmail the parts arrived in a few days, then had to clear UK customs Royal Mail would then charge a handling fee then 20% VAT was added . This meant that parts that only cost a few pounds jumped to £20 or more depending on their value. Re Recycling here in the UK you used to be able to take a car load, but they stopped that and will only accept a few items at a time, otherwise you have to take out a traders permit and that now costs £50 where i live. So i will have to pay up and smile to clear my room of gear that is of little value even when working.

And just how often do chips fail?

Unless the recording is a component recording and has always been in component the dot crawl will already be there. In order for it to be component (yes s-video was considered a component format, just not RGB or Y, R-y, B-y, which used 3 wires) it was also called Y/C. Unless your camera and recorder was y/c and kept the signal path separate there is no advantage at all. Only svhs and hi8 cameras did this. All regular 8mm and vhs cameras used a composite front end. Also dot crawl only occurs when the limanence frequency gets to 3.579545 mhz. Its caused my crosstalk between the luminance and the chroma suppressed sub carrier. This happens at around 320 lines of horizontal resolution. Now considering that vhs drops at 240 lines for ntsc and 210 for pal, as you can see there is nothing to interfere. 8mm also only goes to 250 lines. Svhs and hi8 on the other hand could record 400 lines, well into the crosstalk zone so y/c is necessary to prevent it. The rest is snake oil. Some perceive that the s video output is better, but its all about how it was set up. Most tvs had the s video input set up completely different. Composite had to go through the bandpass filter which in many cases they simply rolled off detail. Think of it like pressing the hi cut filter on a stereo. The s video input didn't use a bandpass filter. Same with tvs that used a combination filter. Yup it has that word "filter" in there again. Later sets with 3D and digital comb filter were much better at separating the y/c component signals. Laaerdisk for example were a 400 line composite format. It had the resolution that would show the crosstalk. A few laaerdisk players had a digital comb filter and s video out and they looked great on a cheap TV over svideo but high end TV with 3d comb filter stull outperformed the basic one on the laserdisk using the composite input. Time base correction is useless unless you are using a 50.00 capture card. Any capture card or stand alone digitizer (DVD recorder ect) already has that, and usually has a 3D capture on the front end anyway so tbc is unnecessary. That beta tape for example would not have been recordable with cheap equipment like my old hauppague capture. It would have choked on the first glitch. My stand alone box on the other hand didn't skip a beat. Not saying that is can't be kicked to the curb, it can but it takes alot. Only on those really bad tapes will I bring out the frame store tbc. No built in 3 line tbc will cut it on those tapes. Spend a couple hundred bucks on a good modern capture box and then you don't have to worry about vcrs with TBC.

Thats only because it was the closest at hand. The other one it just out of arms reach

Yes the mech was the same

Thats what I do. Make videos. Need to keep making videos to make money.

Probably

No, we are smart. We know how you connect 3 wires and get them correct.

They are big inside. Large scale integration

No money in repairs. The prick I worked for changed my pay scale from hourly to commission and started lowering the commission percentage. In the 80's and 90's I was making about 6 grand a month. By 2000 that had dropped to about 2500 a month. My mortgage was 1500 a month back then and I had 1000 a month left over to feed myself, wife and 2 kids plus pay all the bills. The guy I worked for started out paying me 50% commission, then dropped to 40%, then 30%. I was working just as hard, fixing just as many units and taking less home. Meanwhile he bought himself a Porsche. Correction I bought the fu%ker a Porsche.