09.4

//Source(s): Video Review, April 1991, pp. 32, 34-35// "In 1963, the very first home videotape recorder appeared in the Nieman-Marcus Christmas catalog. It was from Ampex; is was called the Signature V; it cost $30,000 (...) It was the size of a coffin; it weighed more. (...) Sony, active in the industrial video arena for years, introduced its CV series half-inch, black/white open-reel format in 1965. (...) "CV" ostensibly stood for "consumer video," and machines actually were sold to home users in such big-ticket emporiums as Neiman-Marcus. The first CV machine (which weighed in at a mere 70 pounds) even had a built in nine inch monitor that popped up for viewing. The format initially produced jittery, flickering images, but incorporated some features that later became well loved, such as timer recording. Although it didn't make much of a splash in the stores, CV made it into some school systems. One (Video Review) editor remembers making his television debut on his grammar school's closed circuit TV channel, which employed CV equipment. By the end of the 60's, Sony went back to the drawing board. AKAI showed two different quarter-inch open reel systems around 1969: one B/W, the other colour. Having led the open-reel audio business, AKAI mistakenly figured sucess in one area guaranteed success in another. A couple years later, AKAI introduced the half-inch B&W VT cassette system for shooting on the go. This faded quite quickly. 1972 saw the advent of Cartivision, which housed half-inch tape in a clunky cassette roughly the size of a hardcover book. The cassette employed a coaxial system wherein the two tape reels where stacked on top of each other. Like Sony's CV system, this format only recorded every other video field, resulting in a soft flickering picture-- but at least it was in colour. The system made it to Sears, and some stores even rented special cassettes that could be watched only once because they were designed not to rewind in home machines. The format failed almost as soon as it appeared, owing to a lack of software, mechanical unreliability and massive consumer indifference. Just before Cartivision's last rites, Sony bounced back with its U0Matic cassette system, which used three-quarter-inch tape and recorded colour signals with good quality. It even had stereo sound. The format's high price and relative complexity made it a dud in the marketplace, but redesigned U-Matic was pitched to the pro market and the format has had success there ever since. Famed long-playing microgroove record inventor Peter Goldmark of CBS labs came up with EVR (electron video recording), a film based colour-video cartridge system that played back on TV sets. Limitations in playing time, lack of recording ability and a big yawn from Hollywood caused CBS to kill the fledgling format just before it was due to hit dealers' shelves in 1971. Meanwhile, RCA had one but two different versions of Selectavision in the early 70's. The first and most advanced, was Selectavision Holotape, and experimental system that embossed 3-D images onto rolls of film. The second was Selectavision Magtape which used three-quarter-inch tapes similar to Sony's U-Matic format. It also featured an in-cartridge scanning scheme that actually shoved the video head drum partially into the cassette. Neither ever made it to market, but RCA's too-hip "Selectavision" trade name later cropped up in the company's VHS tape and CED discplayer lines. The cartridge of Panasonic's mid-70's Omnivision I system housed only a single reel of tape. This system sucked the tape out of the cartridge and wound it on a take up reel inside the transport. This meant you could never remove a casette in the middle of a program. As VHS was catching fire, Dutch electronics giant Philips unveiled its VCR format (they could only register the trademakrk in Europe) It was created for the European PAL standard so when the US market adopted it, it could record only 50 minutes in standard mode. Thinner 60-minute tapes ad a half-speed mode were added, but it was a case of too little, too late. Philip's and Germany's Grundig teamed up on a perfected version of VCR called Video 2000. It used an extrodinarily sophisticated two-sided half-inch cassette that could be flipped over for eight hours of recording time. Sanyo's V-Cord (B&W) and V-Cord II (Colour) used cartridges vaguely reminiscent of 8-track tapes. The first format was limited to 20 minutes of recording times, while V-Cord II had bigger aspirations. This was the first video format to offer two speeds-- [quality and economy]-- as well as freeze-frame and slow-motion. The Cords [failed] because of mechanical unreliability and lack of interest from other manufacturers. Matsushita's VX format was marketed here by Quasar as "The Great Time Machine" The half-inch system featured a coaxial cartridge (like Cartivision) and in cartridge scanning (like RCA's Magtape). In 1976, it one-upped Betamax by offering a two hour recording time. Clunky cassettes and a deck that was a mechanical nightmare, compared to relatively streamlined models in the beta format, made this one easy for Sony to beat. Japan's Funai joined forces with Technicolor (...) to create the Compact Video Cassette (CVC) system. This was the lightest and most portable recording system of it's time. Widely known as the "Technicolor Format," it used quarter-inch cassettes that were generally only available in a 30-minute length--- a factor that contributed to the format's downfall. In the late 80's, a few desperate retailers stuck with large inventories of unsold CVC units tried to unload them as 8mm VCR's." CONSUMER VIDEO TAPE MACHINES

Ampex Signature I (1963)

Sony CV B/W (1965)

Akai 1/4 inch B/W & Colour (1969)

Cartivision/Sears (1972)

Sony UOMatic (197?)

Sony-Matic 1/2" B/W (197?)

EIAJ-1 1/2" (197?)

RCA Selectavision Magtape (1973)

Akai VT-100 1/4 inch portable (1974)

Panasonic Omnivision I (1975)

Philips "VCR" (197?)

Sanyo V-Cord, V-Cord II (197?)

Akai VT-120 (1976)

Matsushita/Quasar VX (1976)

Philips & Grundig Video 2000 (1979)

Funai/Technicolor CVC (1984)

Sony Betamax (???)

(((The dates given here are rough "death" dates, which often correspond fairly closely to their "birth" dates.. thanks to... kaboom@usit.net, pkstveng@aol.com)))