Dependability of low end OLD vcr's

[389poncho]

Has anyone ever noticed how much more "everyday dependable" old entry level and obscure named vcr's were than old high end machine's? Example: my [1980's] cheap, entry level Shintom, Orion, Sanyo and Quasar are all still working fine after well over 20 years. While my [1980's] very expensive, high end Sansui, NEC, JVC, Hitachi and Toshiba were generally nothing but trouble right out of the box. Perhaps more features means a major sacrifice of basic reliability? Anyone have a logical explanation for this??
T'care,
Mike

[classfour]

Electronics, my friend, Electronics. The more there were in the 80's, the better the chance for failure.

[389poncho]

The primitive 80's huh? Makes sense to me.
Thanks classfour,
Mike

[greymalkin]

I wish they still made stereo's like they did in the late 70's/early 80's.

well..they still make them like that..it's just that the average joe can no longer afford it.

[orsetto]

The early to mid 1980s saw a gold rush of brands hoping to cash in on the "hifi" stereo vcr. Its deceptive, because a lot of the "high end" names had absolutely no video mfring capability and simply subcontracted their VCRs out to other makers. Many of the old-time stereo brand names chose JVC to build their vcrs, a mistake they all lived to regret when the machines began eating tapes even before the two week return period was over. Hitachi quality control had more ups and downs than the Coney Island roller coaster. NEC and Toshiba took forever to decide whether they'd back VHS HiFi or Beta HiFi, so for awhile each did both- badly. I had 'em all at one point or another. My favorites were a Minolta (made by Hitachi during a good phase), an NEC (great while it lasted) and the first Panasonic hifi vcr, the PV-1730 (still works!). The NEC and Toshiba Betamaxes actually made much better recordings than Sony did, but were just as prone to self-destruct quickly. I always thought it ironic that Sony didn't work the Rube Goldberg kinks out of the Beta transport design until long after VHS swept the market: people forget now, but the constant mechanical failure and maintenance costs damaged the Beta market as much as rental stores carrying more VHS. Not everyone rushed to embrace VHS in the early years: quite a few folks grudgingly turned to it in desperation when their Beta loading mechanism failed for the sixth time in a year costing $50-100 to repair. Yikes!

Quasar and Magnavox were made by Panasonic back then, and while Panasonic never had the best picture quality they were built like tanks and were the most reliable by far. Sanyo made the least reliable Beta machines of all, and was the OEM supplier of the absolutely horrible Fisher VHS decks sold in every chain store, so I'm not sure where you came across a "good" Sanyo VHS. (Much later, Sanyo produced some very nice high-end VHS decks for TV studios, those were fantastic.) The cheesy no-name brands were often durable simply because they were made in such great numbers and had less features than the "name" machines. Some of the best-looking VHS recordings I have were made on early bargain-basement GoldStar (now LG) and Emerson (Samsung) vcrs: go figure.

[samijubal]

Those '80s VCRs also cost far more than new VCRs. You get what you pay for is mostly true when it comes to electronics, there are definitely exceptions though.

By the mid late '80s Sanyo was marketing VHS recorders under their own name that were completely different and far better than the lousy Fishers were. You've got to give Sanyo credit, they were the only company to do VHS and Beta both in the early '80s so whichever format won they were set.

Emerson was Orion, not Samsuck. Samsucks were every bit as bad or worse than the Fishers were, they were very unreliable and had terrible PQ.

I don't know where you get the JVC problems from. The JVCs back when many different companys used them were rock solid VCRs that lasted forever. I've still got a couple of them that work. They used rubber tires on the idler and reel both instead of just on the idler, a setup that lasts far longer than just on the idler. They didn't start to eat tapes for many years.

[lordsmurf]

"They don't make them like they used to do" is largely a myth. Your memories fail you, and the cheap equipment now often can surpass similar-graded material of yesterday. The confusing fact is that lower-end stuff now exists, so when you buy the cheapest item around, you're not actually making an apples-to-apples comparison.

[389poncho]

The problem nowdays is that if we want to replace a VCR, we are stuck with Walmart type stores and our selection is almost always a Funai built product. Whether it is named Magnavox, Philips, Emerson, SV2000, or Funai, it is still a Funai. I have gone through six of them and their live span has ranged from 3 months to 12 months. Now that is pretty awful when compared to my 80's units that are decades old! We are not offered the selection anymore at mainstream stores and therein lies the problem. We VCR folks are a dying breed which explains our dilemma today. They won't build what the masses [not us] will no longer buy. This is why I am constantly on the prowl for old Panasonic built VCRs [GE, etc.] that I can revamp for reliability and long life. Why? Because I by far prefer VHS to DVD simply because of practicality. I watch many long movies on VHS during workouts. One movie is good for several days. I also go from room to room with a tape and can toss it into any VCR and continue on where I left off INSTANTLY. This can not be done with a DVD. Have you ever tried to find where you left off the day before or went to another DVD player; GRRRRR absolutely maddening! Especially if you're already 5 minutes into your damn workout and still have not found the right place. I would finally just throw the remote, turn on a TV station, do the slow burn and say the hell with the DVD. I often will copy a DVD onto a VHS tape before I watch it just to keep my blood pressure down.
T'care guys. I really enjoy reading all your different opinions.
Mike

[orsetto]

JVC was the emperor with no clothes: period. That is my personal experience, others here have 20 year old JVCs that still work fine, hooray for them, but I got the short end of the JVC stick. EVERY friggin time I took a chance on them. And they were consistently worse when they OEM'd for other brands: just one example, they made a gorgeous TEAC that cost me $600, with digital fx and great hifi. Damn thing began destroying tapes in all sorts of insidious ways two weeks after I could no longer return it, the same nasty predictable path every JVC machine took me down. Whether it was their first "HQ" hifi model, or their nifty little side-loader, the semi-pro model 365, or the "legendary" SVHS models with TBC/DNR: *every* one of them pulled some sort of crap and proved completely unrepairable. I have never seen any other brand make machines that partially erase tapes on playback, create permanent wavy picture distortions on playback that you don't see until you play the tape again, create hifi tracks that cannot be played on any other machine and then become unplayable on the same machine when it inevitably drifts, and all manner of other stupid VCR tricks JVC put me through over the course of 20 years. I put up with it all that time because there was a long period when JVC had the least-awful image quality of all consumer vcrs, but I eventually got fed up and returned to mediocre Panasonics that at least were durable and did not kill their own tapes.

Again, that is my personal experience, which tallies with that of my friends who shared the hobby with me and the customers who dropped machines off at my store for repair service. Others have nothing but "happy happy joy joy" to report with JVC, if I'm willing to concede their reality they can concede mine. There's a spectrum. My experience with LG, Samsung, Emerson and so on was more limited: we had a bunch of them as throwaway testing decks at the post house I worked at in 1986-88. Per samijubal, most of these may indeed have "sucked", we hit a lucky batch that did not. Just as JVC was perfectly capable of wrapping dog sh*t in a high gloss chassis, Samsung occasionally let a decent unit come off its junk assembly line. These were consumer products, no mfr was 100% consistent. The bargain brands also had widely varied distribution: the Sanyo-branded consumer VHS models mentioned by samijubal were never seen in New York, JVC and Panasonic had differing one-off models in several USA regions, and the dirt-cheap specials were never the same week to week and store to store. Talk about "your mileage may vary".

389poncho, VHS is now dead. Deader than dead. You will not find a new deck that works anywhere as well as the older ones you prefer. If you can't force yourself into the DVD era (and I understand your resistance completely), you'll have to scour eBay and Craig's List for clean late 1990s Panasonics or Quasars. A Panasonic 4720 or Quasar 960 are easily found for $20 and are very durable. Or, look for a clean Panasonic semi-pro model AG1970, these $1200 decks have dropped thru the floor on eBay, with many selling below $60. They are incredibly well built and one should last the rest of your life. Any breakdown is usually minor, $50 would cover it for years of use. Picture quality is good-average, it might not meet some peoples standard for DVD transfers, but for casual viewing they are fine and near-indestructible. Avoid the similar but very old AG1960 and the more recent AG1980 which is prone to breakdowns: for hard-use playback, the AG1970 rules.

[robjv1]

Good posts on all this stuff. I just wish I'd forced my family to save all those VCRs we had piled up in the garage that I'd recorded my original tapes on. I have a collection of stuff that is very important to me, but some of it just does not play well in anything anymore as far as the tracking. I'm sure those old VCRs that we had were misaligned as possible when I made these recordings (I don't think they had a lot of $$$ to spend on servicing them).

I wish there was a practical way to adjust a VCR's tracking range on the fly during playback haha. I have heard that there is a way to mess with it, but that if you don't know what you are doing you might put it completely out of whack.

[MOVIEGEEK]

I wish they still made stereo's like they did in the late 70's/early 80's.

well..they still make them like that..it's just that the average joe can no longer afford it.

Yamaha,Onkyo and Denon still make high quality stereo receivers for the price of a Blu Ray player.
As for 80's VCR's:I bought two in that decade and they are both deceased,I have a Panasonic that I bought in 1993 that still works.I agree with JVC being crap players,I bought a highend one in 1998 and it died a year later.

[389poncho]

orsetto,
Thank you for which Panasonic model #'s to look for. That helps a lot. Also, I truly am in the DVD era; I have eight players. But they just can't meet my unique 40 minutes a day requirement. I realize they are far superior for picture quality and storability. If I'm going to watch an entire movie, a DVD will always be my choice. As for copying DVD to tape, my simple little setup works terrific. Two Go Video dual decks, one's a side by side and one's an over & under, stacked up with a DVD player in between. I can get a lot done with this simple combination.
Thanks again,
Enjoyable forum,
Mike

[samijubal]

The consumer level Panasonics while having good reliability have pretty disappointing PQ. The picture is way over soft and they took the sharpness adjustment out of them back in the mid '80s so there's no way to sharpen the picture to an acceptable level. The '90s Mitsubishis had far better PQ, excellent tape handling and other than mode switch problems, a problem with almost all older VCRs, were solid VCRs. The Mitsubishis also have a sharpness adjustment which I consider a necessity for VHS.

[389poncho]

Yes, my old Shintom's call it an "enhancer" knob. My old Sony Betamax has a sharpness adjustment and I just loved that feature. You could dial in that Beta picture so precisely it became a "thing of beauty".
T'care
Mike