History Of Home Video recording

[Kev]

Can anyone point me in the direction of a site that gives the history of home video recording?

Has anything worthwhile been found on them, or were they used to record that week's corrie all the time and now the tapes have a 1980 episode on them before the machine broke!

I'd be interested to hear of any stories from people who owned a video in the mid 70's or knew someone who did.

best

Kev

[William Martin]

UK recorders
www.hypernova.co.uk/total_rewind/

a mix of USA and others
www.labguysworld.com/VTR_Catalog.htm

these 2 a pretty good, and there are links as well

[Mark Boulton]

www.palsite.co.uk is quite good too.

[Troy Walters]

Hi Kev. My website features some of the early video recorders predating the 1980s as I'm a collector of vintage video looking for lost Aussie shows of the pre-1980s. My site is generally about finding lost show of the Aussie pop show "Countdown" but I have a big section called "Vintage Video" which features my collection of vintage video recorders (mostly Philips VCRs), vintage video recorder ads from 70s newspapers and magazines and 70s brochures of various video recorders I got from a mate in Queensland. My site is at 70scountdown.50megs.com/ . Also on my links page, I've put links to almost all the vintage video recorder sites I've come across worldwide including the ones the other guys mentioned. Plus I've created a Philips VCR yahoo group which has pretty much everything on the "VCR" format.

Anyways a story. My mate David in Queensland whom sent me the old video brochures bought a Sony AV-3400 portable VTR with AVC-3400 B&W vidicon video camera back in 1971 and was the only person whom wasn't in the business/educational field to own one, back in those days it was mainly schools or businesses whom were able to afford them. Anyways the VTR and camera costed $1184.50 total as seen written on one of the brochures he sent me 70scountdown.50megs.com/videocat.html , go down to the Sony AV-3400 brochure. He used the VTR and camera during the early 70s doing family videos and holiday videos and some televideo recording too while living in New Zealand. He sold the VTR and camera in 1975 while in New Zealand to someone with one of the 3 portapack reels he had. Anyways he kept two of the reels stored away for nearly 30 years until coming across my website and he kindly donated me the 2 reels and the video brochures late last year. I sent the video reels to a mate John in Sydney whom had a few working EIAJ VTRs and baking oven so he could transfer the tapes for David in Queensland. John had to bake these tapes before transferring them as they were sticky, they are Sony tapes and Sony reel-reel tapes are notorious for being sticky. Anyways as these video reels have not been played since 1975 David thought the tapes would of lost the magnetic orientation and be unwatchable by now but after baking John did a successful transfer of the tapes and apart from the flagwave and the odd glitches the tapes played fine with a nice picture!!!!! When John sent the VHS transfers back to David, David and his family were thrilled to see their old home videos again. John also sent me a VHS transfer copy of them and the tapes certainly had real exciting stuff on them. Not often people did home videos back in the early 70s as it was mainly Super 8 film at the time, seeing fluid motion home videos of the early 70s was a real buzz. Anyways there was a mixed bag on these reels, home family videoing, holiday videoing, video recording of David's Super 8 films projected onto a screen and televideo recordings of bits of TV shows. Now with the TV shows, there was part of a Bee Gees concert in Australia, part of a New Zealand pop music talent show featuring local NZ acts and there is 15 seconds of Basil Brush and a bit of some other show I don't know of. David told me these were recorded around 1973. Anyways the televideo recordings turned out reasonably well too, basically he pointed his vidicon camera to the TV screen which was an effective way of recording programs if you had a camera/VTR suite with no tuner. Anyways that's my story.

I also got from a junk store nearly 2 years ago a portapack Sony EIAJ format video reel, and it's recently been transferred which has a family video on it. So some people had the money to buy these high priced video machines in the 70s.

Also over the past 2 years of collecting old video, I've come across old video recordings of various years between the early 70s and 1980s on both school tapes and home videotapes. A lot of the earliest home video recordings I come across date around the 1978-1982 era particularly for the Philips "VCR" format.

Anyways if you are persuing old videos looking for old recordings, I wish you best of luck as you're bound to come across some lost treasures along your way, these old tapes with lost shows are out there, you just have to look out for them, they'll turn up at garage sales, dumps, charity stores, 2nd hand junk stores, people's attics, schools, universities and god knows where else. In the past two years persuing my vintage video hobby I've had my fair share of excitements and frustrations but it's all worthwhile in the end as I've dug up many old TV shows, some which Australian archives don't even have, and from mates of mine who also collect old video I've got bits of lost Countdown shows from the mid/late 70s, anyways to sum it up this hobby is a worthwhile hobby to get into!!!

Cheers
Troy