Sony SL7200 Vintage Betamax Overhaul repair 

All NTSC machines have a better picture than PAL and SECAM machines. The reason is a much higher writing speed. The head drum, which writes the video signal is spinning at 1800RPM on NTSC machines, In 1/60 of a second the head needs to write out 262.5 lines of the analog field. On PAL the drum speed is only 1250 RPM yet 312.5 lines of video must be written.Due to the slower drum speed, the effective head to tape speed is much lower, and yet it needs to record even more information (more lines).Since the max frequency recorded is determined by the relative head speed, and horizontal resolution is determined by the max frequency that can be recorded, the lower writing speed means less information can be recorded.On NTSC VHS the max resolution (not the scanning lines, that is 525 for NTSC and 625 for PAL, people get that confused, but scanning lines is not horizontal resolution it is vertical resolution).NTSC Horizontal resolution for VHS is 240 lines. Beta2 recorded about 280, and Beta1 300. 3/4" was good for 330.PAL on the other hand VHS was only about 190, and Beta 240. This is due to the lower writing speed due to the slower drum rotational speed, which is determined by the frame rate of the video signal.

This is true! I have a multi system Beta machine (SL-T30ME) and I have a couple of BII tapes recorded off TV and a pre-recorded movie. The picture is much better than the PAL tapes. As for SECAM, what a crappy system is that! It's hard to get a good looking color picture on SECAM tapes. Greece used to broadcast in SECAM back in the 80s and I have some tapes from that era. Very bad picture. Some of them recorded in the Middle East SECAM and some of them on the DDR (East Germany) SECAM.

The only reason that SECAM exists is because the French wouldn't swallow their pride and admit that PAL was better.

I have a few old Trinitron TVs in my old CRT museum. KV1365, KV1965, KV2085 I believe.

Cant Rember The Model But I Think it Was a 19 inch or 20 inch Model But The Pictures On it Were So On The Money Don't Know What I did With it I Think I Was After a Bigger Screen And Sold Off The Sony Pity it Was a Lovely Set.

The original 20 and 25 xbr set had the best picture of any Sony TV. They looked fantastic.

Great Beta machine that one too!

I'll shoot one some day. I just got a truck load of stuff to work on. Up first is a very rare piece of Sony gear. It's called a vidimagic. Go look that one up. The serial number is 175 on this one. Even rarer than the 7200! Go look up indextron to see what I am up against.

Wait till you see the next piece, and I guarantee that you haven't seen this one, as it is rare. I hadn't ever seen one of these units until one was dropped off at my door today.It is a very unique technology that Sony was working on that basically turns a black and white single gun picture tube into a full color shadow mask less tube. Wait for the video it will be up soon.

I'll do something on the old gear this week. I am on holidays, and am not going anywhere this week, as travel is so stressful. Much more relaxing to hang out and play with my old technology.

Really looking forward to the next videos coming out. A Sony Indextron looks like a nice interesting machine. Definitely never seen one of those before. Old vintage tech is so much fun to work on. From simpler times for sure.

CORRECT

Shelley Wayne That's Sanyo's most popular model. Just replace the two belts and the idler and it will run just fine.

You don't want to see that area. I don't want to see it. I get scared every time I venture in there.

+12voltvids lol! I know it is scary but it would be cool to see all the stuff you have. As long as you haven't been called to be on the tv show hoarders you are good!!! Lol!!!

You are seeing it being serviced. My storage area is actually kind of boring. It is just a loft over a barn, heated so the gear doesn't freeze with a bunch of machines stacked in the corner, and a few boxes of old parts and boards. Nothing really interesting to see.

That was the original. Spent a fair bit of time making that montage.

When the head drum looks like it has been sanded it is usually an indication that the user had used a dry cleaning tape excessively.

Ahh thats why i only saw it with certain machines, owner abuse :-(. I allways cleaned my machines heads by hand. Open pore cardboard works really well :-D

Simon It's the 711B2 chassis. The SL-F30, F60 and some other models have the same mechanism. Good luck restoring this wonderful multi system machine!

Record current for both heads.

The Adjustable Record Current is aviabale, only on the first generation on Beta VTR?

No they all had it.

No, not quite to Umatic low band. Beta 1S was better than Umatic low band, and Beta1 SHB was much better than Umatic Low band, especially with the beta hifi turned off. That way the full 6.0MHz od spectrum was available.I am working of getting the edit bay together for a shoot, and edit on Beta just for the fun of it, and I will film the edit process

got it. I'm guessing umatic uses slightly more tape at a similar density... at lest it seems to.

Umatic uses far more tape. have you seen the size of the cassettes?I will be doing another Umatic video as I was just given an old Sony VP2000 playback machine, so I will be servicing that one soon.

I know umatic is 407 inches per second on the video heads (per conversion from 'write speed' in the service manuals) I just haven't seen much of Beta decks and I think they are great...but the "closest" thing I have is a digital betacam. I never had a working beta deck growing up and think I've spent more time even with 1/2" EIAJ, strangely enough. -wish most of the vhs machines had been beta :-(

The first machine I bought new in 1979 was an RCA VCT201 and that cost me 2,000. This machine in Canada would have been more than that. The SL8600 was the current model for Sony at that time and it was 2100.00, and that is why I went VHS, because it was 100 cheaper.

Isn't that just wild. I just did a quick inflation calculation and 2000 in 1980 is like 6,167.54 in 2016.

Right, so remember that in 1990 I dropped 12K on a camera, and another 10K on a camera in 2000 and these were SD cameras.The first HD camera I upgraded to was 5,500.00 in 2004 back when I was still a serious videographer / cinematographer.For fun I think I will haul out some old cameras, and do some shooting, from my oldest ugliest cameras I own. and believe me there are some ugly cameras I have. Going back to black and white gear.I'll record all the ST stuff onto modern digital tape, so the actual picture from the cameras will show through as good as they possibly can. After todays fight in traffic on a wasted trip to the big city to buy parts (unsuccessful at that) I need a project that will calm my nerves. How anyone can crash into a truck I don't know. On the freeway at that. What should have been a nice relaxing trip to the parts dept turned into a nightmare. It started with a bad decision as to which parts store to go. I decided on the wrong one. Get there, only to find that they have moved across town. Funny when I was there 2 weeks ago there was no mention of them moving! So drive to the new location, fighting traffic again, missed them by 5 minutes. Actually I was there on time, but they had already locked the door! Time to fight traffic again. 4 hours to get to town and back, and I should have been there and back in 1!

I love old tech and would love to see more of your collection. Wow that sounds like a rough day. I hate driving through big city traffic. That's why I love shopping online and don't mind paying the shipping prices. Between your gas, time, and piece of mind it's worth it.

I am planning a video shot with a bunch of old cameras for comparison. Everything from an old b/w Vidicon, to single tube vidicon, consumer and broadcast single tube saticon, b/w and color ccd of various pixel densities. Will record everything to do tape, so the quality of the actual camera can be compared. Should be an interesting comparison.

I recorded from the old beta onto dv tape using a Sony GVHD7000 hdv deck in dv mode. That digitized into standard 4:1:1 DV format I then played it back and dumped via firewire to the computer. I could have skipped the record to dv step if I had taken the beta into the house.

Hello. Film looks different because it works very diferently compared to tape. You can get about 4K or higher resolution of film whilst back in the day older 2'' studio tape was quite limited in bandwidth because it really wasn't defined in pixels. Do some more research and you'll find out why film was king. Cheers :)

All the later machines had servos on the capstan and drum motors. Just these first gen units did not.The video2000 never made it to the NTSC world.

The SL-F1 had a built-in video dropout compensator - however this would cause problems when the deck was used for recording digital audio, which used its own error correction system for dealing with dropouts, so there was switch to turn it off when using this with a PCM digital audio adapter. Somewhere, on either the power supply or the plug that goes into the socket on the back, there will be a switch labeled PCM. You need to make sure that this is switched off to turn on the video dropout compensator.

The answer is maybe. Your cable box will have standard AV outputs, and it also has an RF output that sends the signal on channel 3 or 4.Just connect your VCR to either of those jacks and you should be able to record anything you are watching. Some cable boxes, like my system, which is a Cisco 7150 turn off the analog outputs when an HDMI cable is connected. All I had to do is unplug the HDMI cable and connect it to my TV using component, and then the SD video output became active again. I can record everything, and I do it to DVD except for copy protected content. On demand movies, and HBO content is protected. So to record that I just run the video signal through a Macrovision scrubber (I did a video to demo this last year) and I can record everything, and do this on a regular basis.I also have the component cables routed through my Hauppague HD-PVR (original version) and that allows me to record an HD .MP4 of anything I can watch. I do this all the time, as there are series that I have been keeping, Homeland for one, that I have every episode on hard drives.I don`t upload it or anything, just for my own viewing, as I don`t use bit torrent to pirate anything. I work for an ISP, so if I were to get popped for copyright infringement for file sharing my employer would frown on this.

+12voltvids Thanks for the info! I will see if I can get it to work when my holiday break from college starts. On a side note, my dads uncle had the SL-7200 Betamax. He bought it in early 1977 and also purchased an inexpensive Black and White camera alongside it The SL-7200 was his main VCR up until 1984 when he switched over VHS due to the fact that the Beta format was on its way out (which was also around the same time my parents bought their first VCR, the Magnavox VR8416SL01).

Try these guys. kpcomponents.co/ They are local to me, and I have bought a few things from them over the past 30 years. He won't know the belt from the model though. You will need a size.

12voltvids Youre a life saver man! I really appreciate what you have done here on RU-vid. Watching your videos really teaches quite a bit about these old electronics. I got a umatic right before I found your channel. It's a vo-2800, still trying to get it up and running. It was owned by a scientist. Can't seem to understand how the mechanism from it works

Stevo701 Gaming I have a vp1000 and vp2000 plus a Panasonic 9200 umatic and a Sony vo4800 portable. Pretty old machines.

Man that vp 1000, 2000. Can't imagine the amount of hours put on those things. I was also given a jvc vidstar hu-3300 it needs some new belts though

Yes it was very good. Unfortunately back in the day people didn't care, because if they did Beta would have won the format war.

Yes original JVC and Panasonic mechanical units were here. I have an old JVC, actually a few of them

I did an edit demonstration last year of the SLHF1000 editing package, editing a 30 year old tape.I am still toying with the idea of hauling out an old camera and Beta deck and doing my raw shots on it, and cutting together on the SLHF1000 units. It would be a basic set up though, just the 2 decks together and probably a single monitor set with just auto assemble used, no titles, no croasfades.I just need to find something that I can make a short video of, because naturally the video would be about the old gear, and the actual process of analog production and editing.

Really cool idea. And don't forget a vintage mic to go along with it. What I have learned from this video is that no matter how lo-res you go youtube will still find a way to sodomize the signal.

You mean the vintage microphone on the camera. Sure why not. I just attempted to upload a video of a very unique piece of gear I repaired, but it had to go because there was a 30 second shot of a concert projected on the wall in the background, (from youtube of all things) that their content ID matched and blocked in Canada and the US. So it is back to edit the scene again, invert it and put a nice big title over it to fool the content ID crap. This isn't the first time that a image has been picked up in the background that has caused grief. That one should be ready to send up again tomorrow. Kind of pisses me off though, because the source file is about 5 gigs in size and my internet is metered, so re-uploading a video to fix a 30 second scene will cost me in over usage fees by my ISP as I am very close to my limit now.

All the early vtr came out of Tokyo factory.

6 machines a day? That would have been a slack ass shop. The pressure cooker I worked in I would see 3 or 4 TVs and 8 or 9 VCRs in a 9 hour day. The pressure was always on me, day after day. After 20 years it was time to get out. That was just for me, as the master tech. The assistants were busy too, they would disassemble and reassemble the cabinets. It was a regular production line. A unit would be torn apart by a gopher, I would find and fix the problem, and hand it back to the gopher, and he would put it back together.Why did I call him a gopher? Because every time I turned around he would "go for" coffee, or "go for" drive to pick up or deliver a TV. He was always going for something, and I was stuck in the pressure cooker with no windows, and no ventilation. With all the smoke and chemicals I inhaled on the job I am surprized I am still alive.

Those ones don't count, because first they were never available in North America, and they were proprietary format. In other words the tapes would only play on the same model. As Philips released newer models they were not backwards compatible. U-Matic was the first video cassette standard, followed by Betamax, and then VHS. There were other formats also released, but they were never in widespread use. Also I never said it was the first VCR, I said it was the first Betamax model, released as a stand alone machine. The year before Sony released one that was built into a colsole TV.

What do you mean about backwards compatible? The N1500 was compatible with each N15xx deck. The N1700 series was a different system, although the use the same cassette. Whatever you want to say, but the N1500 was the first consumer vcr available. And yes. Europe was 4 years ahead of north america on this one..

Right, you just said it. Same tape but not compatible. That is just like the reel to reel systems we had here in the 60's, that's right the 60's and I have one, a Sony VC2000. The tapes all fit, but the signals were recorded differently. Betamax and VHS solved that problem.Even when S-VHS was released, it used the same physical size tape, but a different format, but it could play back the older standard tapes.Remember we had Umatic here in the early 70's which used the big 3/4" tape before any of the 1/2" cassettes were considered.

@@12voltvids The Philips VCR format actually was briefly marketed in the US under the Norelco brand, but it was a flop. The fact that the maximum running time of the NTSC version was only 50 minutes (vs 60 for PAL) probably didn't help: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-HvzOUrUshfQ.html

I found the problem, one belt needed to be replaced. Now works fine except will not play in color. Will record in color but plays it back in black/white. Put the recording on another player and the color is fine. Any ideas on that problem??

@@tommills8368 AFC trimmer on the chroma board is probably off.

@@crashbandicoot4everr Thanks for your reply. What does that, "off", mean? The board needs repaired or replaced or turned on?

@@colllisionman Off-adjustment I should say. There's a trimmer (variable resistor) that adjusts the AFC for the chroma. 12voltvids did it on the SL-8600.

@@crashbandicoot4everr How do I find it? What am I looking for? Can you describe it please?

If the belt had melted I clean it up. I generally don't film the process because it is messy and time consuming but I have shown the process.

It would sure look like shit that for sure!

Quad was an early standard, and when it was set up properly delivered the best picture that the analog formats could produce, because it recorded the entire video signal without converting the color.When helical 1" hot the market, it could rival quad, with much better reliability.The small formats, 1/2" and 3/4" were never considered broadcast quality, as their signal to noise ration was not good enough, even though these small formats did make it into some areas of broadcast, namely news gathering where the quality compromise was acceptable.It wasn't until betacam that 1/2" tape was able to be called a true broadcast format, and it de-throned king 1" from it's place at the top of the video food chain. To me more precice, betacam SP did that, not standard betacam.1" still had many more years at the standard in broadcast though, it just no longer was superior in quality. The 1/2" tape format had caught and is some aspects surpassed it. (Componet chroma recording)

Yes very rare these days. I got this back when I worked for Sony. The heads were worn completely when I got it.

It had beta 1 but but it was low band beta 1. High bans beta 2 and 3 looked better. High band and super high band beta 1 was fantastic.

@@12voltvids I remember when those super high band machines came out but they looked like someone had turned the sharpness all the way up so I didn't like them. My SLHF-300 made great looking copies of laserdiscs.

@@andershammer9307 the only machine that had super high band was the slhf1000 and it recorded a very good picture rivaling 3/4" umatic tape. The VHS camp came out with the HQ circuit which just sharpened the edges. B

The SLHF1000 will produce a better picture in B1 if the SHB option is turned on. If the Hifi audio is off it will be better still.

Not this machine he wouldn't. This one originally sold for probably 2500.00

It was actually $1295 in Feb 1976. The first Betamax which was sold in a TV console, the LV-1901 did cost 2500 in November 1975.

The first VCR I bought was an RCA VCT201 and it was 1999.99, and the reason I bought it was because it was 500 cheaper than the Betamax SL5400. Perhaps that was the price in the USA but in Canada it was much more than that. A KV1940 19" TV was 1499.99.

I have an original example of the first Panasonic VCRs like the VCT201. An NV-8600-EM built in November of 1979 which is a multi system one.

If I remember right, It was more like 1977