1970's Sony U-Matic Video Tape Recorder Test vs HD! 

Considering its 50 years ago, it's outstanding

I had a U-Matic VCR a few years back, and the recording quality, for a 50+ year old video format, was one of the best pictures I've ever seen!

That was a very effective test. I used to service these machines in the 90's, the 5 series u-matics were great to work on. I don't have a u-matic machine now but am looking out for one. I have three BetacamSP machines though! As others have said it's not a broadcast standard by any means, it's about the same bandwidth as VHS but both video and (stereo) audio have a much higher S/N ratio so it can edit WAY better with less degradation. It was heavily used for production work and editing in the 70's through to the 90's, as the equipment was far cheaper to own or hire. Once their editing was finalised, the final cut from the original broadcast tapes (or film!) would be made

This is really cool! I heard that my father bought Taiwan's first U-matic video recorder back in the '70s during a Sony exhibition in Taiwan, using it to produce commercial videos. Recently, while doing research for a documentary about my father online, and trying to find what the U-matic recorder really looked like, I came across your video. Finally seeing the footage it produced is truly amazing. Thank you for sharing!

Lo-Band U-Matic was never considered to be a broadcast format, at least not in the UK, it's horizontal definition is roughly the same as VHS but with a much better signal to noise ratio for both picture and sound. The later improved Hi-Band variant (PAL only) was used for ENG (Electronic News Gathering) in the 1980's. There was one final version U-Matic SP (PAL & NTSC versions existed) which used better quality tape but was soon replaced by Betacam SP. SP=Superior Performance, not the same SP as used in VHS.

Dear John, I think you made a great job for today´s and future generations! Thanks!

The quality of the U-matic is alot better than what I had imagined. Nice that you have a working machine to help preserve old memories or play lost episodes of tv from years past. Interesting to see the difference in quality. Could you play a clip of 1970's era recorded u-matic tape for us to see?

I use three Sony U-Matic decks for capturing analog to digital video for archival purposes. The process includes the use of a Time Base Corrector, Waveform Monitor and Vector Scope which greatly improves the finished product. If you run your 3/4" recording through a TBC, with the aid of a Waveform Monitor and Vector Scope, you will see even better results.

I used U-Matic in high school and at TV stations. I was the 1st video camera news photographer in 1977 on the Central California Coast. Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo. I carried 50 pounds between the U-Matic deck and camera. After the TV station freelanced in Los Angeles and Seattle with U-Matic gear. I sold it when I went to Betacam to get lighter to 30 pounds. You can see me in a movie called "A Minor Miracle" on RU-vid.

I used to shoot and edit on hi-band U-Matic with a few different tube and ccd cameras, BVU-50P, BVU-110P, 3 x BVU-200P, Videomedia Eagle edit system, BVT-500P, GML System DVP and 3 x IF-500, all of which I still have, apart from two of the BVU-200Ps. Editing took forever, but I got some nice results. Thank you for your video, you've got a good machine there which is quite unusual these days.

Wow, how I miss this era! I worked with U-Matic in the late 70's and 80's. In a tv station. The tapes cost a bundle!! Only tv stations here in south america could afford to use them. Nice video.

Used these machines a lot in television production class in high school back in the mid 8o's. Used in many television stations in the US during that time. Editing with those Sony machines was a dream.

Brings back memories when I was in commercial post production house. Had used U-matic before, Betacam and at the time it was already Digital Betacam, D1, D2 format available at that time. But it was definitely a standard at the time even for TV broadcast.

I worked with U-Matic tapes for decades in TV stations in Texas We used them as well as Sony one inch machines up into the early 2000's.

My Dad, job hunting after losing an inside connector sales job, took a chance on an educational supply company in rural Wisconsin (Nasco). He mostly sold to schools and some businesses (small electronics shops, banks, and the US Navy). This division became so big it split off as Kapco and Dad stayed with them thru retirement in 1982. The equipment weighed a ton but was first-class in reliability.

This is very cool indeed. I love old analog sounds, recordings, etc. It's a more full ambient sound with more depth than digital. Jack White of the White Stripes was using analog recording equipment for the White Stripes albums 20 years ago and I believe he used it for all their and his post-White Stripe solo albums. Led Zeppelin allegedly used the U-Matic system to project their Earl's Court shows up onto a video in May of 1975. They also used this system three times on their 1977 US tour - on April 30th in Pontiac Michigan at the Pontiac Silverdome, at The Summit in Houston TX on May 21st - The Summit had its own internal house system to project around The Summit and on July 17th, at the Seattle Kingdome - the Kingdome film is the only that anyone has seen and it's all over RU-vid. Just yesterday audience bootleg video footage of Led Zeppelin’s show at the Pontiac Silverdome surfaced on a channel on YT called "Speedy Films." In that footage one can see those large box style U-Matic cameras -- would it make sense for those U-Matic cameras to be on stage without being attached to a U-Matic taping unit machine ? Can one bypass taping what they are projecting on the video screens ? Led Zeppelin was making very large amounts of money and it just doesn’t make sense that with the money they had and how big that 1977 US tour was - that they would run that U-Matic system and not put tapes into the machine. LZ had 50 stage hands with them on that mammoth tour. What say you ? Could you help explain if those U-Matic machines and cameras be used and not have tape inside the machines ?

別々に演説されると大変でしたね！撮影はとても上手でした。👏👏👏👏👏👏❤❤❤

Hi, afaik that color lock switch was used, when used as a drive for their professional PCM converters. In early days of CD production U-Matic tape was the defacto standard for delivering the digital master to the production plant.

The Open University early morning / late night transmissions on BBC2 were broadcast from Hi-Band Umatic - we used to transfer from the one inch TX masters or later D3 TX masters making “UOU” copies. I think the Hi-Bands were actually a form of component recording which is superior to composite.

What I'm so shocked by is that there isn't a big gamma shift. Through the multiple conversions happening it all seems to be handling the conversion of the different gamma and color transparently and that's impressive.

Hey John, This was the first tape format we used to use and learnt our editing skills on as well as the 2" suite. I have lots of my old showreels of animatics on Hi band and low band umatic that I'll have to pop by to look at sometime. Hope you are well. Tony

I'm surprised that the converter box actually processed in anamorphic 4:3 into 16:9 frame with no deformation, Wow! Also the audio quality is almost identical.

Have used one before. When I was younger in school I used to use one for editing education videos.

I'm doing social service at my college (required for me to graduate) and while working at the video archive I found quite the large number of U-matic tapes, both the larger ones and the small "S" tapes (all of the smaller ones being marked as camera masters), most of them dated to the late 80s, early 90s, really interesting since almost all I've read says that they fell out of fashion in the early to mid 80s once Betacam came to market.

At this very moment, I am sitting in my univesrity lecture hall which was (re)built after the destruction of ww2 in the 1950s and modernized a little bit at some point in the 70´s or 80´s probably. There is the control room at the top which still has the 16mm RCA film projector in it and two slide projectors, left and right, alongside with a modern digital beamer which is used nowerdays. In the front cupboards next to the blackboard, there is a huge stack of audio/video equipment. A little Sony control monitor, a quite modern S-VHS recorder from the 2000´s and some big swithchboxes to switch the video/adio source between the three different lecture halls and other rooms where they used to have cameras to demonstrate things (veterinary medicine). There are six spots, three on each side, on the walls of the lecture hall where tue huge tube monitors/tv´s were standing. Those were probably removed a couple of years ago, all the other stuff like cables and scart connectors is still there, just as the Sennheiser audio system with 4 speakers. In one of the cupboards next to the blackboard is a huge collection of U-Matic and U-Matic-S video tapes with recordings from the 80´s but unfortunately, I can´t locate the U-Matic recorder. It as probably removed at some point and replaced with the S-VHS machine, but the tapes ar still there. I do actually want to save everything that is still there because the building will be torn down in a couple of years anyway. I just don´t have a good feeling of giving tose tapes into other hands for making digital copies, so maybe I´ll have t go through the hassel of buying a U-Matic machine to to it myself. We´ll see... I do find the picture quality outstanding by the way!

Cool demo. One thing I will say though, is that PAL analog formats always looked better when digitized. Simply because they have more lines of resolution. I noticed this all the way back around 2000-2001, a friend let me borrow a DVD that was a documentary of the rave scene, mostly in the UK. IIRC it had interviews w/people like Sasha. It was shot on PAL Hi8 - not even a truly professional analog format. On standard definition US televisions back then, we couldn't believe how good it looked...certainly as good anything recorded on NTSC DV. Mind you, for a commercial project like that they would have used the best Snell and Wilcox PAL to NTSC converters, so that surely helped. And let's not forget that European 625 TV formats looked better, period. I noticed this the first time I went to the UK and Europe in 1993. BUT, I found the 50hz flicker to be noticeable and annoying. Even fluorescent lights seemed to be strobing to my eyes that were used to 60Hz!

It looks nice either way, and I'm an analog fan, but as far as quality goes, HD obviously wins.

Great COMPARISON! greetings from uruguay

Enjoyable video John. I have two low band u-Matics here. Been given some tapes to transfer - b/w with flittering glimpses of colour, but basically just coming out as b/w picture. Guessing the tapes were recorded on a high band u-Matic... The colour flickers are prominent on PAL. I still have playback on SECAM, but no colour signal trying to break through. Ideally, I need a HighBand u-Matic I think..

Amazing 5:03 even the colors are almost th same. Not so sharp, but it's not bad at all!

One can notice the difference, but its not much of a difference. This is very cool.

Watched this video because there's a huge U matic video player in a shop nearby and I was wondering what it was.

No comments? It looks great in my opinion !

Low band was not broadcast it was educational and industrial. BVU for ENG was the first broadcast umatic. Picture looks good perhaps you need to clean the heads….

Hahaha, hi, John I was just looking for any pictures or video of the old Sony 2630 lo band U-matic edit suites with RM88U controller that I started out with but really can’t find anything much, just a few videos of the recorder. The 5850 were state of the art and out of my price range at the time, showing my age :-)

Thumbs up for your efforts. One thing to note, the U-matic is not a widescreen format. It's full capacity can naturally be admired in 4:3 aspect ratio. The 625 horizontal lines of PAL signals are reduced to around 250 picture lines by U-matic (much like VHS) however the vertical definition (so to speak) is unquantified, only limited by the quality of the analogue recording bandwidth, which is the first generation Lo-band as you say. Hi-band and SP are the better U-matic variants, and all three are (as you'd expect) head and shoulders above VHS. Somewhere along your record and playback journey, has anything been lost? Was the camera's 16:9 picture squashed to 4:3 for recording using all 250 lines, then stretched back out after playback? When viewing traditional 4:3 media on 16:9 TV, I'd always prefer the black side bars rather than zooming and cropping. Then I know the resolution is as high as available, and the original cameraman's framing is as originally intended.

It looks quite good. But you've done something with the format? Umatic was 4:3 ratio. Since it is new to you, pull out on the bottom of the bottom front panel.

I found one at goodwill. Is it worth money?

What was the process of converting the U-Matic recording back to digital format to use it as footage in the video?

Trying to find a working U-matic deck isn't easy.

I've got the same VO-5850P machine and an accompanying VO-5800 I do editing work on occasionally. I notice your 5850 has the same tape dropout issues mine has (black dashes in the video). I wonder if that's just worn heads or if there's a common fault with this model.

hello there I have one of these machines and it's in perfect working order

Nide video, thanks for sharing. I have a doubt, please see if you could help me out: I'm buying a 30 years old u-matic recording from a museum and one of the tapes that worked one year ago is not working now according to them. The deck is not reading the tape anymore, it gives an error. Do you know if these old tapes are unreliable like that? Or is the equipment not being serviced properly? What do you think?

I was looking for a solution. There is a short film I am working on that I wanted to shoot with a 80s vhs vibe. Perhaps I could use this setup and get that vibe…thanks so much…we’re there any U-matic tape based cameras back then?

I use to work in a tv station as a Reporter and I recently found some tapes of that format 3/4 of an inch for U-Matic all my entreviews back up are inthose cassettes , how much would you charge me to do the transfer to a memory card so I can put that intreviews in my instagram... I hava an entreview with President Vicente Fox of México when he was a Candidate!!! and also with Quiet Riot Rock and Roll Band!!!

I just saw a umatic recording on the movie Spawn at the swap meet which is why I am here. I wonder if it was worth any money??!!

make a green screen out of the U-Matic format

what equipment did you use to capture the u-matic

Hi every one! I`m from Bulgaria. I have two cassettes KCA60. Sell them for 10 BGN . I do not know what is record of them. Mey be the record is more expensive!?

Looks ok on a tablet size screen.

To be fair your losing extra Resolution and clarity due to the recording of 16:9 on a 4:3 tape format.

would you sale the U Matic? I will buy it from you!

Don't forget to take the lid.off and.gently clean the video heads and tape path Use stripps of plain copy paper to gently clean the video heads. Use isopolic alcohol to clean the heads with the paper stripps.