Found two old 1970's Philips VCRs

[Funky Dude]

A while ago I was talking about the early 1970's Philips VCR.



I was on the hunt for these old big machines and I talked to one of the electronics teachers at TAFE college who looks for old electronic equipment and he told me he saw a couple in a back shed of a junk place where they sell anything from scrap metal to old electronics devices. I went there and there was a heap of ancient electronic equipment including old valves. Anyhow I went in the back shed and found these VCRs although there were no Philips tapes around. I bought the two VCRs for $50 and I was expecting them to not even power up or smoke when I switch them on. I've tested them and they power up okay, but they need some work done on them. Hopefully I'll get the cassettes for them and test if they play okay, because I might find some valuable footage of early shows on them because many 1970's shows were deleted from video archives and taped over because of the rising cost of tapes, but some people had these VCRs and taped early shows.



The two Philips VCRs I have is the N1500 which would have been on the Australian market around 1974/75 and a long play N1700 model which would be from about 1978.



Anyhow here are two links to pictures and details of the 2 models of Philips VCR I have:



N1500 - http://www.hypernova.co.uk/total_rewind/P_1500_a.htm



N1700 - http://www.hypernova.co.uk/total_rewind/P_1700_a.htm



From what I read these machines were mainly available in UK and Australia.



These machines are pretty big and both of them take up my whole desk. And the cassettes are double the thickness of a VHS cassette because one tape spool is on top of the other, I can fit two VHS cassettes in the tape carriage.



I've become a bit of an old VCR nut lately. I've even pulled out a whole stack of U-Matic tapes from the large dumpster outside the electronics building at the TAFE college I go to.

[dfc99bb]

A later version of the Philips 'VCR' system almost made it to the US in the early 1980s. The videocassette could be flipped over and recorded on both sides like an audio cassette. But by then Beta and VHS had taken hold in the US and the Philips machines never appeared in the US.

Check out this website for info on old video systems -

http://www.labguysworld.com/

[discorecordplayer]

thanks for the links, guys

very interesting