N1700 - are it wasn't a dream

[RWels]

Mar 25, 2017 15:30:41 GMT Peter Stirling said:

I had vague memories of Thames TV providing progs on the N1500/1700 Philips cassette.

I recall 'Looks familiar' and stuff like that

..However I was beginning to think I had dreamt it .

But now Ebay has confirmed it.

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Jazz-on-Four-Art-Blakey-on-n1700-videocassette-/152478072172?hash=item238066bd6c:g:x7cAAOSwJ7RYUa8i

But is this fully prerecorded, or a bit of an inside job? The description mentions an engineer and off-air.

Prerecorded N1500 did exist, just not a lot. Even now totally forgotten formats sometimes had prerecorded tapes, a year or more ago there was an example posted here of a Frankie Howard show on even obscurer format with laser read pictures.

[Gary Critcher]

I agree, it looks to me like a normal off-air recording, only done by someone who was employed at Thames and got hold of one of their old cassettes to use at home.

[RWels]

Not a dream.

[Gary Critcher]

& I bet they cost an absolute fortune!

[John Smith]

The Dennis Norden one is a demo tape, i have one here

[Mark Tinkler]

Blimey - did he? Denis (note the one 'n'!) did one for laserdisc as well...

[John Smith]

There you go

[Matthew Brannigan]

Once the N1700 tapes got going the quality was really very good indeed but there was always a "chewy bit" at the beginning on most tapes I've encountered where the first two minutes are a mess. Every time I see an 80's (or even 90's) N1700 tape recording I think "Argh, what awesomeness did they wipe over to tape that!" as 1983 is definitely the arse-end of N1700 usage - my school replaced their two machines in late 1982 with Betamax and I suspect many schools did the same around this time.

[Richard Marple]

I remember hearing of someone who bought a load of N1500 tapes with promising BBC labels only to find they had stuff from the mid 1990s on them!

I'm a little guilty of buying some tapes from a car boot sale in 2004 & reusing some of them, though I did extract some interesting continuity from them before.

If You Tube & capture cards had been around them I might have saved the ad breaks as well. Some of them I never fully used so there might be something to salvage.

[Richard Marple]

Some high spec V2000 machines had an auto reverse features & some late ones could double the duration.

Also they had auto tracking as standard, years before VHS did.

[brianfretwell]

I seem to remember the heads were mounted on peitzo electric crystals so they could be moved slightly in response to the level of the signal on the tape (or was it an extra signal that was added in different phases on adjacent tracks) so the head could LAO be kept on the right track in freeze frame mode.

[Nick Cooper]

Apr 1, 2017 23:58:24 GMT Peter Stirling said:

You have probably heard of the Philips 2000 system which was literally out of this world- a cassette that you could flip over and play down the otherside 4x hours per side, combined with noiseless freeze and speed frames and a clever search marker.. When Sony retired Betamax with their tail between their legs they combined the good bits of Betamax and the good bits of the 2000 to produce the Betacam system which revolutionised outside broadcast video filming.

Betacam was introduced in 1982 - long before the end of Betamax production. It was the high-band replacement for U-matic, and owed little if anything to VCC.

[edstradling]

I recently saw some 1991 recordings on Philips, I couldn't believe my eyes!

[mattchurchett]

Always makes me smile when I come across more recent recording on out of date formats. I've seen 2001 recording on Betamax, and I've found mid 90's recordings on V2000.

I guess if people have spent a lot of money on a certain format, then they want to get their money's worth out of it

[Robert Lia]

I actually had a working Sony Super Betamax till 2004 and had brand new tape so I used the line in from the satellite to make some very high quality Beta II recordings