A couple of weeks ago someone was commenting that manufacturers like Sharp seemed to lose interest in Top End boomboxes during the 1980s and was asking why. Recently during a clear out my sister found a pamplet that had been in the TV Times about "The Magic Box" more commonly known as the VCR. I recently read in an article about the history of consumer electronics that by the mid 1980s, 70% of Japan's consumer electronic exports were VCRs. Although many UK manufacturers offered VCRs, in reality they were nearly all made by JVC in Japan like the Ferguson shown below. No wonder the Japanese stopped concentrating on Audio gear. Here a a few scans of adverts in it. From the dates of a couple of film reviews I think it is from 1983. Finally a picture of a Sharp camcorder I bought new towards the end of the 1990s. The Sharp Viewcam was £550. No wonder they could afford to sponsor Manchester United FC.
Wow, interesting read. Always particularly loved Panasonic's VCR offerings. Even the oldest examples I find in the wild always seem to be solid and working. I would definitely say that Panasonic was the biggest manufacturer of VCR's in the 80s (at least here in the states), since Quasar, Magnavox, Sylvania and many US house brands (such as Sears and JCPenny) commonly rebranded the cheaper Panasonic machines as their own. In fact, I even saw a Panasonic made GE VCR at one point. Here's some proof: Exhibit A: cheap Panasonic VCR from 1987... Exhibit B: Cheap Magnavox VCR from 1988... Almost the same design... Exhibit C: Cheap Sylvania VCR from 1988... All of these units share the *exact* same screen and mechanism, all Panasonic made. Man, those Sharp Hi-8 camcorders were nice. I always loved how they twisted in the middle for easy movement of the lens without disturbing the screen.
We had all sorts of makes over here including Panasonic. The people i bought my first house from in 1986 had a £600 HiFi Stereo Panasonic in their £24000 house. My first VCR bought in 1984 was a Mitsubishi. With only three TV channels in the 1980s VCRs and Video rental shops were very popular over here Another thing my sister gave me was her "Made in the U.K." Sharp VHS VCR bought in about 1987 which has similar styling to the Panasonic you show. Other Japanese companies were doing the same to avoid import duties. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...oECBEQAQ#v=onepage&q=uk VCR factories&f=false The reason rebranded JVCs were so popular here was that many people rented, and Thorn EMI who owned the main UK TV brands and most of the rental shops had a tie up with JVC. In fact I only learned recently how close they came to launching their VHD video disc system here going as far as building a factory to press the discs. I have made good use of the twisting camera module a few times, pointing the screen downwards and holding the camera above my head when in a crowd, for example at the Rockefeller Ice Rink Opening Gala. You can actually turn the camera 180 degrees to take selfies before the term had even been invented and it flips the image so you are appear the right way up.
Ugh, Don't get me started on Mitsubishi. I really love their high end S-VHS stuff, and I've owned a good bit of it, but I've found their reliability to be quite bad. I found stuff going wrong in multiple models and I would be thinking, "How could this simple part be going wrong, this is the last thing I would expect to go bad on a VCR!" Hope your experience was better than mine. A Sharp VCR made in the U.K? That sounds really rare! That's kinda like my 1989 JVC 27' S-VHS TV set which was made in New Jersey! It was JVC's very best here in the US in 1989. The internet knows virtually nothing about it. It's Full square tube was made in Japan though... That's interesting to here about JVC and the UK rental scene. That's quite a monopoly! The closest thing I can think of for here in America was Blockbuster, but besides the video game rental scene in the 90s, I can't tell you much about their corporate agreements with other manufacturers. Check out this commercial for Panasonic's VCR in 1983. I think it really speaks a lot about the point you made earlier, that manufacturers were focused more on Video than audio. I mean really, what boombox commercial features glamour shots of the unit apart and a futuristic robot to boot!
I used the Mitsubishi for about eight years with no major problems. I was going to say it was nothing fancy, but it was actually a "portable" although I never got a camera or battery to use it in that role. https://www.google.com/search?q=mitsubishi+hs700&client=safari&channel=ipad_bm&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=cOrLeMZGpu_aOM%3A%2COSYm9EXVJTR-MM%2C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kRWDq85BiNrb0ihHorOLCSxkZzJoA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjMjO_ZivTpAhW0QRUIHYj0D98Q9QEwA3oECAYQBQ&biw=887&bih=598#imgrc=cOrLeMZGpu_aOM: During the 1980s and 1990s lots of Japanese manufacturers set up in the UK to avoid European import duties. My TV, bought in 2009, is a Toshiba assembled in the UK, although I bought it knowing it would be one of the last as the factory was closing. Today, most Raspberry Pi computers are made by Sony in the UK. https://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/business-news/staggering-10-million-raspberry-pi-13384529 The video in that link is worth watching if you can get through the adverts. I didn't realise Sony has been manufacturing here since 1974. I did know they gave Prince Charles and Lady Di his and hers Walkmans in 1981 as a wedding present. My current VCR is a JVC SVHS with built in Time Base Corrector, which I believe was made in Germany like many JVC VCRs. That was from 2002 as the box had details of their sponsorship of the 2002 World Cup on it, but I bought it cheap as new old stock in about 2004. Unfortunately JVC has gone the way of many British manufacturers here and is just a badge stuck on products from the likes of Vestel (a large Turkish TV manufacturer).
Ahh, yes the portable VCR. The only thing similar I can think of that I had was the SONY EV-S1. It's a portable 8mm (Video 8) VCR. Complete with programmable record timer, flying erase head, and PCM stereo support (for all of those 8mm pre-recorded stuff that never took off). I guess you could say the 8mm deal was just another home video format that never eclipsed VHS or Beta. Yes, I loved JVC's newer S-VHS stuff as well. I had the JVC 9800u unit Can't remember the rest of the model number, but it was magic. it could fast-forward the tape and maintain the audio at the same time! It also had a TBC, which was great. It also supported the S-VHS ET mode. Interesting watch about SONY and the UK factory. I can say that I don't believe we ever had anything like that in the US ( besides Apple Fremont ).
The VCR was magic back then, before the 80's, once a movie was shown, it pretty much disappeared except for limited cable TV and midnight movies. The "cult" movies were impossible to see; Star Wars used to come back every few years in the theatre and still get lines to see it right up to when HBO got the rights to it, when it was new, in the late 70's. I remember VCRs were pretty new and very expensive but people were buying them to record that movie. Nicer audio equipment was in a free-fall in the 80's and the VCR kept a lot of the smaller guys like JVC, AKAI and even Sansui going through the decade. There was so much margin on the 2nd generation units and everyone was buying one but sadly, just like audio, bare-bones, entry level units started showing up at a fraction of the price of a "nice" unit, killing the demand for the nicer stuff. I've got a few Video 8s in the shop, I've found some over the years at the thrifts and remember how expensive they were in the 90's. Most of it never bottomed out at entry-level basic issue and they tend to have really nice build quality and a ton of functions. Every once in a while I'll pull a camera out and they all seem to still fire up. Luckily they've gone up in value, I don't know who buys them or for what but they're a pretty cool piece of technological history.
This is what is under the TV at the moment with the JVC HR-S7860 at the bottom. The Humax is a PVR, which I upgraded with a (now almost full) 2TByte hard drive. It runs the famous "custom firmware" which allows you to do things like view the hard drive from a PC . The Fujitsu Siemens is a HTPC. Whatever happened to that idea ? Sony made a couple, but unlike theirs this one uses a standard MiniATX motherboard so I swapped it out for an Intel I3 when those came out. The top unit is a Panasonic Hard Drive / DVD recorder which nowadays only gets used to play DVDs. I have thinking of swapping it for a Bluray playing with streaming capabilities. I actually own a couple of other SVHS VCRs including a Panasonic picked up at a charity shop about ten years ago for £12. They probably didn't realise it was any different from a Funai, although I have a couple of those picked up recently for free. I think MiniDV replaced Video 8 before prices really started to drop. When we bought the Sharp Viewcam Hi8 MiniDV was available, but the cheapest ones were over £1000. By 2004 prices had dropped and a fairly high end JVC was £400. I was tempted at the time, so when I saw the same model a year later as ex display in a cabinet in Dixons for £200 I bought it. People who suddenly realise that their old tapes aren't backed up anywhere. People complain that most new audio tape decks are low end stuff these days, but with Video Tape no new machines are available at all. I recently decided it was time to transfer my MiniDV tapes to a computer. The JVC I bought new, and which was only used to record about four tapes has developed a transport problem. So has has another JVC which I bought working at a car boot sale a few years ago. I ended up buying a third MiniDV camcorder from a friend which works, although not from batteries. I wonder what the situation will be a decade or two from now as more and more VCRs die and no new parts, or people to fit them are available.
I'd say one of two things will happen. 1. The professional services that you ship your VHS and Mini DV tapes too to get converted will become more prevalent, and prices will get much higher for those services, or 2. VHS and others will become like Super 8, where companies and hobbyists repair machines (or make new ones) and sell them for a small fortune for digitizing tapes and hobby projects. Yes, there are brand new 8mm machines being manufactured for the sole purpose of converting, and this could happen to VHS and other mediums too. Here are some interesting links: 1. https://www.amazon.com/Transfer-Service-MiniDV-Digital8-Digital/dp/B01LZT1SFJ 2. https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Movi...d=1592317125&sprefix=8mm+conve,aps,161&sr=8-6
I think you are right on both the numbered points. Regarding 1, there will always be a market for video transfer. Here in the U.K. there have been quite a few episodes of classic TV series e.g. Dad's Army and Doctor Who in which the only known copy has turned up as someones home copy made on a format like Philips N1500 VCR. Back when professional (Ampex) video tapes were large and expensive the BBC had a now unfortunate habit of re-useing them once a programme had been shown a couple of times. With the Music programme Top of the Pops which started in 1964 they only started keeping them from 1976 which means that all the early performances of bands like the Rolling Stones (who were the very first band on the programme) have been lost. Regarding 2, years ago I made a working Betamax machine (Sony C6) by using the best parts from two non working machines. Amusingly my boss (who was a Betamax loyalist) used all the scrap bits to get £100 off a brand new top of the range Sony C9, as at the time Sony were offering that as trade in on any machine "working or not". Somehow I doubt if anyone will start making VHS machines again. A cine projector is 1930s technology and could probably be hand made. Things like the head drum in a VHS machine were cutting edge technology when they first appeared and always needed specialist machinery to make them. In fact I recall reading that the reason VCRs were initially so expensive was that there was only one company capable of making machines to make the head drums. Of course things changed and the last machines were significantly cheaper than a replacement head for the early ones. Tat was partly due to economies of scale. When the market dropped to less than a million machines a year the last manufacturer, Funai, decided it wasn't worth continuing to make VCRs. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/japans-last-vcr-maker-is-finally-stopping-production#:~:text=RIP the VCR: the last manufacturer in Japan is finally stopping production&text=Funai Electric, the last company,making the devices this month. Incidently the machine in the picture is a Philips VCR which pre-dated both VHS and Betamax.
You might wonder if any idiot actually skied down a slope with a full sized VHS recorder strapped to them and with camera in hand, the answer is yes, I have been that idiot. I've even still got the kit, I think it's JVC, full sized tape recorder / player with another module that clipped (I use the term loosely) onto the side of it that had a built in tuner. I even had quite a few of the accessories like the title editing box and a few other bits, that will be going once I get that far into the loft. Quite a few years prior to VCRs, this is what I used to carry around the world with me. Quite an advanced machine for the 70's You could receive TV in just about every country in the world as it had so many options including being able to switch the sound separation frequencies between 5.5 & 6.0 MHz. It was no slouch in the the Radio department either with it's SW reception, only limited by not being able to get SSB properly, I even managed to tune into a satellite carrier, the ship's professional radio operator (yes we still had them in those days) was astonished at what this could receive. I'd have to check but I seem to remember it could record to tape from more than one source as well.
