Skantic VCR-LP (Philips N1700) video recorder repair. Frantic Skantic. 

Anyone noticed the Easter Egg in the thumbnail for this video?

Awesome repair, thanks for the video! These machines were amazing, and fun to repair and “hack”. If I rememeber correctly, by halving or doubling the value of one capacitor you could turn these VCRs into “Super Long Play” machines, doubling the LP recording time (4 times the N1500 standard), albeit with a (fair) reduction of video and audio quality -of course. Great stuff!

There's something beautiful and romantic about these monster mechanical VCRs. My first was the ITT VR580 as a 14 year old, re-watching Top of the Pops was like magic. Nice fix Colin, any day you don't blow yourself up is a good one.

That machine turned out quite well after some work. Philips really made that a nice machine, and it's fairly easy to work on.

Another great video Colin I've got the philips n1700 doing the same thing as your machine I'm still working on it it's a great video recorder

Brilliant video and extremely informative, thank you!

fantastic work !

Impressive how stable a picture you can actually get on a fairly early machine like this

That was a pretty easy repair, you were very lucky to have a decent replacement head, these things are hens teeth! I am hoping that one of my machines has a decent head, but in my experience most of these machines were retired due to worn heads :(

Skantic was actually originally a Swedish company named “Skandinaviska Radio AB” and after the Second World War the company struggled and was bought by another electronics manufacturer named “Luxor”. Luxor used to make all of their products themselves, but in the 60s they started to import a lot of products with their badge on it. Luxor worked together with Philips quite a lot at the time and Luxor sold Philips made record players, tape recorders and such. They even sold a reel to reel video recorder under their own brand. I think it was in 1974 that Luxor first started selling Philips VCR machines, the first one being the equivalent of the N1500. In 1978 Luxor launched their own computer named the ABC 80, this was however not in collaboration with Philips. With this computer Luxor sold a game pack and one of the games were called “Masken” which means worm or snake. Then in 1979 they were bought by the Swedish government because they were very close to going bankrupt, and they were eventually sold to Nokia in 1985. Nokia then incorporated the game “Snake” into their mobile phones.

Well done, Another machine saved and not a bad picture now :-D When you had a dibble in the psu i thought of the ua723/L123, i remembered when i was given a very dead philips machine years ago, there was more than one ua723 on the boards. A good i.c but they die for no apparent reason, i have a psu that failed and the ua723 had died, tapping a 741 op amp on to the 7v ref pin and the feedback pin allowed me to use the output of the 741 to drive the rest of the psu. (A temp bodge untill i got another ua723). My dad had the Hillman hunter, not a bad car, and the hillman with the engine in the boot, odd car lol.

I had never seen a VCR this primitive, very interesting !!

10:32 Someone asked me to change a belt for a machine like this, the gentleman drove 130 Km for this!

oh, and yes you got the clock set to 17:00 nice little touch!

thank you

Falta na minha colecção este formato,e o U-Matic.Este que mostra no video nunca foi comercializado aqui em Portugal.

Thank you great video looked forward to this one. Were they the first VCR ever made well before Beta and V2000?

hi ive just found your channel ,very interesting and am hooked ,i remember buying these machines at boot sales years ago and then taking them to the tip when they never worked! i never ever found one that worked ,i was curious if you sell working machines or have a repair service on them??

great video, I've got two of these units and hundreds of tapes, can't find one single technician in Australia who would be willing to work on it.

For ease of service you could also unscrew the tape door cover, then you can also troubleshoot the vcr.

At the end of a repair video, can you give a summary of the problem and the solution attempted to fix them? Thanks.

Hi I bought a new one of these in 1978 at over £700 have had several head replacements quiet early in its life, very impressed with your videos and it has inspired me to get it going again i did strip it down over ten years ago and as usual the 2 belts were scrap, can you point in in the right direction to getting some new belts and from where regards Daryl

Hi. Great video!. Where can I find the 2 belts you replaced?. I just found some kits on eBay but they are really expensive. Many Thanks

Can't get my head around the fact that it uses a belt for the head drum. How does it maintain accurate sync at those frequencies without direct drive? I thought drum belts were for washing machines...

So where do those replacement ICs come from? Are they new? Do they still get produced, after nearly 50 years?

i wish you could reposition your camera so we can see what your doing sometimes your arm or head is right in front of camera apart from that very interesting video thanks.

You know the N1702 gives a test picture when you want to do a channel search, if you press play (or was it record - play) without a cassette.

You need an air compressor to blow all that dust off.

Is this player imported from Sweden or was Skantic sold outside of Sweden in small numbers? Looked on ebay there is litteraly nothing branded skantic on there, Skantic is a Swedish brand owned by Luxor and Skantic and Luxor are brands that where VERY common here in Sweden but basiclly unheard of in other countries

Video99, i have the full schematics for the Betamax Sony SL HF100. Would these be of any help you as ill scan to a pdf. This may take a while, as there are ALOT of pages.

I also see it's a one reel cassette like an 8 track just wondered how it works

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