All My Children (AMC) was an extremely popular soap back in the day. In the student center at my university there was a large area with a TV tuned to soaps all day. Big crowds at AMC time it was funny. I had a high end Toshiba VCR I bought in 1991, that thing was amazing. Very heavy, all metal, built like a tank. My wife and I would watch AMC every night or binge watch, plus tons of other shows. That VCR lasted for 13 years and thousands of hours recording, playing, forwarding and rewinding zipping back and forth and never had a problem. Even the remote never showed wear. It did finally die though, it was sad to see it go. But by then it was obsolete, we had a DVR. It was an amazing piece of equipment. It came from an audio shop, so not the cheap stuff like at Wal-Mart. There is no way any electronics today can even come close to how things were built back then. I still have my Technics component stereo system from 1988. Also great quality. Would not trade it for any new junk made today. It's too bad people who were not around back then will never know what it's like to buy something well built and made to last. Everything now is just cheaply made disposable junk.
used to work in a repair shop, know what you mean, those old units were worth fixing, they last a long time. I remember tv's coming in that were 20 yr old, we would fix them. Sony & Zenith were 2 of the best sets.
I remember seeing this at a friend's house when I was a kid. Frame buffer?? MIND BLOWN. I kept pushing the button over and over trying to catch funny still poses, until my friend-with-no-sense-of-humor got mad and told his parents. Then I wasn't allowed to touch the VCR anymore. So thanks for bringing that up -- now I'm mad at.... whatever his name was.
A week ago, I got an NEC VCR that has a very similar loading mechanism but it uses a better quality loading motor and not those crap ones with the plastic on the back. But on the carriage mechanism, it DOES use that crap motor but its not weak. I needed to replace all the belts and the tire but I didn't not have the right tire so I used a different idler wheel assembly. It plays perfectly but when I rewind or fast forward, it stops near the end of the tape. I'm going to try and buy a new idler tire and hopefully it will fully work.
I own an earlier model of this VCR. I have my instruction manual. The M5900 appears identical to the model in your review. Except for the TV Still button which is just a pause button. CFM stands for “Confirm” to allow to confirm the Timer programming. HP stands for high quality picture which involved a circuit for picture improvement. A number of VCR’s claimed a digital improvement circuit. MPX was a filter for use with an FM tuner. It filters out an extraneous noise. Many manufacturers encouraged the idea of using VCR’s as audio recorders. VHS HiFi is a high quality system. The channel preset system on both your VCR and mine was common on most VCR’s of that time. AVI was a search feature. Allegedly, with this button depressed the tape would stop and preview multiple recordings on a single tape. I never used this feature. Best of all, for years Toshiba VCR’s ignored the Macrovision copy protection distortion when used as a recorder with another VCR.
I have a similar Toshiba model from about 1985 with original remote that I still use that I've owned since I was a kid. Same motor issue fixed. Good to see these things still out there! Might note that greasing the track might add friction as the grease gets older, stickier, and collects dust and dirt, but if it works for you, don't worry about it. The take up rubber idler wheel eventually loses traction and slips. A rubber renew, or tire replacement usually fixes them up. I've converted some vcr's of this era to a gear / clutch drive to avert this aging issue. Thanks for sharing!!
In some countries, like the UK, you had shows which were simulcasted on TV and FM radio. You could then get the stereo sound via FM. Also those machines were commonly used to make decent recording of the radio. The MPX switch activates a 19kHz notch filter which filters out any residual pilot tone from the receiver. It's important as it could mess with the bias currents.
No, not really. Since TV and Radio stations were operated by the same companies and transmitted from the same site, it all came via the same microwave links, or at it was later, over high speed ISDN links with virtually no delay. Granted, I've never actually seen such a thing here in Germany, but the BBC did apparently simulcast concerts regularly that way. Of course now with DVB where you can easily have 5.1 Surround sound, so that's not needed any more.
I've always been a fan of "vintage professional model" VCR's - with jog shuttle (on the front and/or remote), insert, audio dub, flying head erase, and other bells and whistles, but never seen one that can "pause live TV". This clip is an eye-opener. Thanks for sharing it. :)
Whoooaaah digital still feature for live tv? I can imagine how advanced & forward this huge complex giant beast was at the time in 1988,because eventrough it only accepted analogue signals but for live still feature it had to digitize the video to allow this. Man,even my HDTV. still lacks this handy freeze feature.
May be crappy now but at the time, they sure put a heck of a lot of engineering into it!!! marvelous! I love the way the Japanese tend to design PCBs. They label things nicely, have things nicely organized.
I was in the USAF in germany from 1985-89, and I bought this exact vcr from the base exchange. I loved this vcr. It served me well for many years. I'm trying to find one to puchase now but the 2 on ebay are broken, parts only models.
I had a Scott VCR Stereo 4 Heads bought at Sams clubs in the late 80s, it too did the Still Store of live tv and it also did strobe function on the live video as well. It also had excellent sound and a separate volume control for the headphone jack.
Excellent video!. 80's consumer electronics were amazing, all those complex mechanisms and electronics are very interesting, the industrial design with all the square buttons, sliders and switches... beautiful!, but if you want to master all the functions of that beast you will need TV production studies hehehe.
I never realized how easily VHS tapes can break, especially really old ones. Like when I ejected my copy of Land Before Time Sing Along Songs, causing the tape to get stuck and ending up with tape salad after I finally pulled the cassette out.
i remember this "freeze" feature on later VCRs there after in the early 90s, i remember as kids wed argue about using to for contests/giveaways on TV since we had NO DVR's or werent recording 24/7 tv footage.
I worked as a service engineer in a TV store when this was the latest VCR on the market; it took pride of place in the showroom, but I don'r recall us selling many. Thankfully I left before any came back to the workshop to be repaired
The MPX filter is for avoiding distortion when recording from FM radio. FM stereo has a "pilot tone" at 19 kHz that identifies a stereo broadcast. Good FM tuners should suppress it, but some not so good ones don't, and in that case it gets to the recorder where it can cause interference with the carrier frequencies of the HiFi VHS audio system. The MPX filter avoids this by a notch filter at 19 kHz. It should be off when not recording from FM because you don't want a notch filter otherwhise.
hated VCRs with tuners like this. As a teen, the pastor of our church had one like this in the parsonage. Forget how many times my brother and/or I (two of the three sound technicians) had to go over and reprogram it.
10:10 You asked what HP Select is. This is unique to Toshiba machines. It has to do with the playback and picture sharpness. In the 90s I used to have different video recorder machines at different times from Sony to JVC and Ferguson Videostar. I never had a Toshiba. Every one of them were just as noisy because of the motors spinning for the various parts to work. The constant whirr of the head drum spinning was so loud I was able to ignore it. Eventually the noise became intolerable so I got rid of them.
I remember that one! Saw it when I was working in a shop that re-sold and repaired machines when I was learning how to do that. I had to play with it for a while... I think that one back then only needed a belt and it was good to go but this was over 20 years ago. It wasn't around long because it was easy to sell.
We had a TV with an input for a video laser disc years before they came ,,,,that was the thing n the 80s fantastic future features ,,,do the home appliance manufacturers still build in future compatibility??
I had the DX-800 which did te same as it also had a digital strobe feature for slow motion effects on both live TV and Tape. Like this machine I found that the Display panel always got weak and dim throughout the years!
It would be interesting to see what (if anything) this VCR does to the vertical blanking interval with its freeze-frame feature. Some tapes of course had Macrovision and/or closed captioning data up there!
We had a TV and friends had VCRs that had channel tuning in a similar way. "Low" was channels 2-6, "High" was cable channels 14-39, then air channels 7-13, and "UHF" was ... well, UHF channels 14-70 or whatever. :D
Yeah, there are two different chunks of VHF TV band, one in the 54-88 MHz range, and one in the 174-216 MHz range, and then UHF runs from 470 MHz upwards. If you're dealing with a tuner that's got a bunch of tapped coils in it, it makes sense to treat those as three completely separate tuning ranges. BTW, UHF actually went up to channel 83 originally - the spectrum for channels 70-83 was reassigned in the 80s, and the spectrum for channels 52-69 was auctioned off just a few years ago.
HP stands for High Picture. You get a clean picture for viewing. EDIT picture will display a much sharper image for editing purposes since you will end up loosing some of the sharpness when making a copy of a source tape.
whoooaaaa that point to point wiring. ALL TEN MILES OF IT. The digital frame store/TBC cards that were used on a lot of these VCRs all looked fairly similar - they tended to have the same flash ADC and weird lookin' RAM chips. I've always been tempted to get some of those cards and add some extra logic to the addressing lines to allow me to turn the picture into a weird mosaic puzzle and swap lines around
It is 90's manual mixing machine... To mix up many line input device like video camera, another video source like another VCR, live mixer machine to create effect or awesome video footage...
CFM might mean Compensate for Macrovision. HP could mean "hold picture" or freeze frame. AVI might mean Audio Video Input, allowing you to switch the source from off-air to A/V inputs.
Stuff like this was made with some thought to repair though, quality enough to have test points and access to pots. No doubt a very detailed service manual out there.
So you can "pause" live TV, but not resume from that point? So it's basically like a temporary screenshot feature? Cool for the time, but I don't see how useful it would really be. Also, the whole broadcast stereo thing takes me back. I remember being able to play Mtv through my dad's stereo for the first time and it was mind-blowing.
I always used to dream of that feature in the late 70s and early 80s for when they were reading a telephone number or address out on air for taking part in a competition or an advert for something that you had to send away for (for those few occasions when you actually saw something you really wanted but couldn't find a paper and pen in time).
"Four home computers worth of memory" ... I wonder how much memory each of those computers had? (I'm going with 128kb, as you need about 512kb for a half decent digital stillframe, IE one roughly equivalent to laserdisc quality... that'd be 544x480 with 8 bits of luma, and 272x480 chroma rez with 8 bits per channel... all up 16 bits per pixel effective (8+4+4), and 522,240 bytes = 510kb of memory used. Of course they might use only half the vertical rez, or some other way of reducing the overall data load (combination of lower horizontal rez and lower colour depth) which might reduce that to 256kb, so it would be four C64s, but that seems a bit cheap considering how much the missing 256k would actually have been worth at the time vs how much the VCR probably sold for) And it is really a bit of a gimmick, isn't it... presumably Toshiba thought they couldn't quite justify adding the system simply to clean up video stills (and reduce tape wear when sitting on pause for extended periods) and had to extend its utility to the main TV signal too...
I had a SuperBeta HiFi I sold in 2000 for good $$$ Better quality than any VHS. Heads spin faster and faster tape speed. SL-HF750ES ES is their "esoteric" high-end stuff. Talk about built ! The big motorized tape drawer itself was amazing. Sony ... No Baloney !
No, for to set those gears in syncronization you just align the triangles marks in the gears, it is not that hard. There is several triangles, and several pin/circles. it is in the SERVICE MANUAL!. So, is required to set it once.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Terminal posts suggest a balanced cable, like ladder line, but those are only really good in free space - they very easily pick up nearby electric or magnetic fields if there is anything conductive in their vicinity. Which there will be, in a domestic situation. There's why you use coax. So... why the balanced cable? Does American TV just suck *that much*?
Actually, new plan: Databits! Video request, please: Comparison of American and European RF connections for television. Antennas, cables, frequencies. Why do Americans have VHF stations, when Europeans do not? Why do you use terminal posts, while we do not? Why are your coax on what looks like an F connector, while we use belling-lee?
Vyl Bird At the time, most coaxial cable for TV was RG-59 type, a narrow, inexpensive cable that is lossy at UHF. Twinlead had less loss (provided it was installed correctly). Today, RG-6 cable is almost universal, and UHF is in wider use (Band III is still common, but only a small handful of TV stations are on Band I). Note that though we have many stations known as Channel 2 (3, 4, 5 or 6), most of these stations transmit on UHF.
Earlier televisions used 300 ohm twin lead on both vhf and uhf prior to the wider commercial adoption of coax. Then they made 300 ohm twin to 75 ohm adapters for use on the VHF antenna.
Too bad Sony upstaged them with the "Digital" Betas of 1988 (The SL-HF840/860/870D). Not only could it do freeze frame, but silly effects and picture-in-picture too!
Chile. I actually saw the first Hi-Fi VCR in 2001 and I was so impressed. VCRs were still used until around 2006/2007. DVD took longer to adopt because people didn't have cheap DVD players or burners before, and my country is... very inclined towards piracy, let's say. VCD was quite popular in the transition phase, though.
M. V. Shooting seems legit. Sorry about the late adoption in your country. But hey, on cable in our country, most of the channels didn't even have stereo broadcast. So recording wasn't much of a good thing.
At that time consumer electronics was expected to last many many years and no proper battery will survive this amount of time. The install supercaps instead that can hold dat for 2 or 3 hours given the fact that in most first word countries ... outages are really uncommon. But they could have installed an standard 2 AA battery holder in the back. Probably no space left LOL.
