JVC HR-C3 VHS-C VTR (VCR) - I took a big chance on an 'Untested Spares or Repair' 

Wow it's tiny! Really impressed with the record quality of it too. Cool piece of kit.

The record quality isn't bad at all considering what it is. The head cleaner also seemed to help clear it up considerably from that very first recording you did on it to the second one with the new tape.

We called these Porta-Packs back in the 80's. But they were never this small and cute, they were three times the size and about 5 times heavier with built in batteries and took full size VHS tapes. LOL. You are no longer restricted to filming inside and you can review what you filmed on the camera's view finder. :) It's strange how the colour is better on tape than direct. Hope you had a wonderful Christmas day. :)

Wunderschöne Weihnachten und einen guten Rutsch in das neue Jahr Du bist wunderbar...Danke 🤗 sorry i am from germany 🤗

Found one! with the camera, batteries, instructions, full kit 👍🏼

Oh no, I turned to dust when you had to explain what VHS-C even is just in case

Grande maddi ❤👍

Merry Christmas

Hello! You have a vintage, japan made. I like oldschool technique. Thanks for video! Awesome👍

What a nice and compact device. Whish you and Rich a wonderful Christmas Time!

I'll watch this later when I have more time. :) Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you both.

The fuzziness and the colour smearing brings me back to the Christmas and New Years 99 tapes 😊 I bet the motor spinning up had a brief current peak and 500mA is once it gets going.

VTR is the old term, used before tape came in cassettes, when it used to come on reels. It was still used by the manufacturers to refer to machines that used video cassettes in order to differentiate professional/broadcast grade machines from consumer-grade machines. The reason for the difference in colour is because the original PAL signal has about 1.3MHz of chrominance bandwidth, whereas VHS only has about 400KHz. That means there's a lot of attenuation of the higher-frequency colours, which you can see for example in the darker, richer red of your top compared to the much more washed out red in the direct feed. I'm guessing they attempted to compensate for the lower colour contrast by slightly boosting saturation.

I really need to stop looking at to channel. These things are so wonderful, they give me too much inspiration! 😂 lovely as ever.

100% Agree with your assessment about the colour. It was interesting to see the amount of noise on you clothing with the direct feed and how it calmed it down and coloured it nicely on the other. Very interesting stuff! Great to see you having fun with the family. Thank you 👍

VTR is I believe a pro term to differentiate the video tape machines (Quad, 1”, etc.) from the ones that took cassettes (UMatic, Beta SP, DVC Pro, etc.) But as how things go in broadcast…it just kinda stuck.

Hiya Maddi ☺️ The build quality of that JVC VHS-C video recorder looked amazing and l was shocked on how good the capture and playback was as well. Very much worth buying it untested in the end, great stuff. Just like to wish you, Rich, Neelix and Co. a very Happy Christmas. You all have a good one ☺️👍🏼

Hope Santa was good to you lulz all the best for 2023 and thank you for your wonderful retro insights

The HR-C3 is darling. Happy holidays and a joyous New Year! Thank you again for all the fantastic videos!!

Merry Christmas.

Zabardest

It's so cool to still see equipment like this still being used.

I could swear I was watching America's Funniest Home Videos when the cat was playing with the tinsel! 😂 Awesome video, Maddi. This really brought back memories. The portable recording unit is absolutely gorgeous. I was obsessed with equipment like that, and still am! Hope you and the family have a great Christmas and New Year.

Amazed it worked after powering up! Usually when I get something like this it needs quite literally everything doing to it (full disassembly, new belts, pinch roller, idler, manual head and tape-path clean, etc etc). And to make matters worse, a lot of the perishable rubber components are getting increasingly hard-to-find, these days.. I recall the vast majority of these 'portable' machines used to come with an (optional) tuner unit, so that you could not only use it like a normal (and very cool-looking) VCR, but also 'dock' the recorder without having to faff about with additional cabling. The tuner unit would usually charge-up the battery. Tip: It might also be a good idea to locate a copy of the service manual, as that'll help immensely with any future disassembly work. I also recommend not using video head-cleaning cassettes as they can do more damage than good! If you get a head clog, an easy trick is to simply leave a (known-good) cassette running for its entire duration. Back in the day, some of the more unscrupulous repair shops would do exactly that (and charge you £50 for the privilege!).

Nice videos by the way! :-)

Hello I bought this HRc3 unit new back in the 80’s. Jvc paired this with a beautiful camera and I loved the quality of both units. In addition to the battery packs you have they did make a back with a DC plug that replaces the battery for ongoing use. I have all this in working condition and would love it to go to someone who enjoys the technology as I won’t use it anymore. I shot weddings professionally with it along with all my kids events. Beautiful set up. Let me know if anyone is interested?

I've got 3 of those JVC VHS-C units and unfortunately none of them work. Would love to get them working but so compact inside as expected. Great seeing one working 👍

That is a great bit of kit, there is something about recording on a video camera that makes catching a moment seem really special, where as if you use a phone it just looks too good. When you look at your footage out of context I don't think you could really put a year on it. I thought you was going to chase the window cleaner around with your video camera 😂. Richard is right you do light matches weird. The match competition was funny and I agree with your cat burnt matches smell good! 😊 Oh and Merry Christmas 😊

Great find it works really well, i think a lot of these portable machines will have a good chance of working or having good heads most i bet have not had many hours use ,At my sisters is a portable beta machine and the tuner that makes it like a full size video recorder< i have a camera for it here and the 1 that came with it is at my mum and dads it was all full working order .In my mum and dads loft is a full size panasonic m7 it was fully working and is in its camera case if my dad lets me have it i will power it up and do some recording with it .

J adore tout ça

Newer seen that kind of vcr but would think that could be some sort of vehicle addon like stereos back in the day :) Though i have an adapter to use those small cassettes in a full size vcr but what i didnt ever use or get in the day was betamax. It kinda died fast and quietly?

Video tape recording always has a slight degradation over a direct feed shown as lack of details, color is warmer but inaccurate, softer and noisy due to the chroma under scheme, But that was the only way of recording instant home videos without having to develop a film, Later on S-VHS and Hi8 achieved better recording quality in terms of luma details, but color suffered the same way.

Hello! Nice video! Thi video unity is capable to deliver 250 lines of horizontal resolution. Another thing you have to keep in mind, when you started up your unity for the first time and you got "Battery" problem and you switched to a battery supply, you´ll get more problems in the future as the problem is still inside your video. The problem is a capacitor that is in the front pannel PCB, called C3 that is laking. Hope this helps! Asier.

Need this, its amazing

Nice Find !

Great video. You're funny 😆 I just got ahold of the same vcr, and it managed to get itself stuck in the "emergency mode" which is when the stop button flashes and you can't open the cassette door (the tape isn't inserted). The spindles that load the tape near the spinning head are stuck in the play position, so the eject button doesn't work. I was wondering if you could check on your machine if it's possible to take off the door mask like one would on a cassette deck? It would be of great help. I was planning on taping some behind the scenes of the recording of my album, so I'd really love to get it working again. Thanks in advance!

I think VHS is 212 lines so not even pal res.....but yeah. its nostalgic AF!

What type is the camera connector? I have the same model of the VCR, and would like to use it to record external composite signal, but I struggle to figure out how to make the cable. Is it HR10A-10P-10P connector? Do you have the pinout maybe?

I'm looking for one of these myself. If anyone has any suggestions please comment

Hi Maddi, dunno if you know of this guy www.youtube.com/@video99couk but hes the absolute guru for anything involving tape...seriously his collection of super rare consumer, pro am and industrial pro machines and the knowledge to fix em is bind moggling. I think hes down in Devon UK so prolly worth picking through his grey matter for....well anyfing ...one of dem quiet geniuseseses. unlike me.

What would be a price for a vhsc compact video cassette recorder hr-c3eg be worth?? I have one available.

Is the problem of it not turning on a lack of power to the VTR?

The colours are better with the VHS-C but it's also darker. Kinda weird.

Couldn't get my portable (full size) VHS deck to work. Trying to connect the CRT camera to a capture device to make some comet trail christmas light videos. Android won't give me permission to capture to a USB drive. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

Did you know they did HDvhs

Jealous - I always wanted one of these! I got my first camera setup in '93, it was a much older separate system from the late 70s. Just for fun, I brought it back to life a couple of years ago - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qLySsZGemus.html