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Vintage Television and Video Vintage television and video equipment, programmes, VCRs etc.

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Old 24th Mar 2023, 2:45 pm   #1
German Dalek
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Arrow Austria: Philips` history of the VCR!

Hi folks,

Here is an austrian film about the history of Philips and their story
about the evolution of VCRs (language is german):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EzljEacCp0

Happy weekend,
German Dalek
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Old 26th Mar 2023, 9:54 pm   #2
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Default Re: Austria: Philips` history of the VCR!

Great material, thanks for posting!
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Old 27th Mar 2023, 10:27 am   #3
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Default Re: Austria: Philips` history of the VCR!

I too thought that the video is well worth watching yet, from memory, on my visit to the Philips Museum in Eindhoven the Video 2000 development and launch was missing.

The engineering and assembly of the video 2000 though does illustrate how Sony and Philips both approached the technical challenges being the first on the market with a business product re designed for the domestic market.


The YouTube video's "The death of Europe's last electronic giant" and "How Philips nearly went bankrupt," are timely reminders of how easy it is to get it wrong and most importantly, the need to be agile and not to "dig your heels in" wasting billions of shareholders or public money.

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Old 27th Mar 2023, 12:10 pm   #4
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Default Re: Austria: Philips` history of the VCR!

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Originally Posted by simpsons View Post
I too thought that the video is well worth watching yet, from memory, on my visit to the Philips Museum in Eindhoven the Video 2000 development and launch was missing.

The engineering and assembly of the video 2000 though does illustrate how Sony and Philips both approached the technical challenges being the first on the market with a business product re designed for the domestic market.


The YouTube video's "The death of Europe's last electronic giant" and "How Philips nearly went bankrupt," are timely reminders of how easy it is to get it wrong and most importantly, the need to be agile and not to "dig your heels in" wasting billions of shareholders or public money.

Chris
Yep, Philips seemed to think that technical excellence would win the Video wars - it wasn't. In fact, VHS had brokered deals with production companies to release VHS tapes of blockbuster films of the day. The ability of someone to turn up at their place of work and 'brag' that they watched 'ET' the previous night on their tele was in fact proven to be much more important. And yes, it was surprising (certainly to me) that people were happy with the rather awful quality of those first VHS tapes.

That's what marketing and market research is all about. It's not a little 'add on', an afterthought to address accepted protocol, and it's not about a group of high level directors sitting in a boardroom deciding the future of home electronics. Eight well healed executives do NOT constitute a thought process anything like that of the general public. The moral to the tale being never underestimate the buying public, always perform carefully designed market research before embarking on a manufacturing route. And in any case, the quality of VHS improved greatly as tape manufacturers caught up with what was needed from the machine makers.

Gordon Bussey told me that Philips, having lost the V2000 battle were then committed to building the best VHS machine on the market. I don't know whether they did that, probably not.
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Old 27th Mar 2023, 6:49 pm   #5
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Default Re: Austria: Philips` history of the VCR!

Best VHS machine on the market?, nope, they didn't even come close, that accolade must surely be claimed by Panasonic with their highly engineered machines, although the fragility of their G deck did leave quite a stain on their reputation with many engineers!.
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Old 27th Mar 2023, 6:58 pm   #6
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Default Re: Austria: Philips` history of the VCR!

Certainly the first generation C wrap Philips machines suffered with lots of mechanical problems due to the cheap flimsy plastic deck. Early models were so prone to failure that larger Philips dealers were offered replacement second gen machines as one for one replacements. Philips didn't even want the faulty machines back! Cwrap? They should have omitted the 'W' that would have been a better description!
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Old 27th Mar 2023, 7:15 pm   #7
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Default Re: Austria: Philips` history of the VCR!

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Certainly the first generation C wrap Philips machines suffered with lots of mechanical problems due to the cheap flimsy plastic deck. Early models were so prone to failure that larger Philips dealers were offered replacement second gen machines as one for one replacements. Philips didn't even want the faulty machines back! Cwrap? They should have omitted the 'W' that would have been a better description!
Weirdly the Charlie deck c wrap sets weren't too bad, never crunched the gears, heads were easy to replace, pinch rollers ditto, a colleague could actually replace the p roller whilst the thing was in operation!, performance wasn't bad, pinch rollers would completely disintegrate under the action of those cleaning cassettes though, the later turbo deck was a nightmare.
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Old 27th Mar 2023, 7:58 pm   #8
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Default Re: Austria: Philips` history of the VCR!

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Originally Posted by slidertogrid View Post
Certainly the first generation C wrap Philips machines suffered with lots of mechanical problems due to the cheap flimsy plastic deck. Early models were so prone to failure that larger Philips dealers were offered replacement second gen machines as one for one replacements. Philips didn't even want the faulty machines back! Cwrap? They should have omitted the 'W' that would have been a better description!
The idea was unlike any other and it was built on a metal frame, so far so good... And after roughly 55 revisions it was silent and reliable, but still unsuitable for editing and the like for which they used said Panasonic decks...

Though this definitely wasn't the first generation VHS deck from Philips. That was the Echo deck (a traditional M loader) which was introduced in 1984 and was quite well constructed. Probably with VCC compatibilty still in mind (instead of ending production by january 1985, it was planned to seek European cooperation and build a large modular video factory that could produce both VCC and VHS machines on the same production lines - obviously nothing came of it: Grundig continued on their own until 1993 and Thomson sought out Toshiba as a partner).

The "best VHS recorder available" was sort of true when they introduced their first Echo based machines in 1984. They had one touch autotracking and relatively advanced controls for other functions, as to soften the blow a little bit for people who were used to "no tracking knob at all".

Last edited by Maarten; 27th Mar 2023 at 8:08 pm.
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Old 27th Mar 2023, 8:12 pm   #9
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Default Re: Austria: Philips` history of the VCR!

Even the Echo deck was partially derived from an earlier VCC deck, albeit without the rubber Idler as that VCC deck had separate reel drive motors but it had a lot of similarities to the later deck, in regards to the M format lacing and the main cam also the pinch roller assembly to the later VHS Echo deck
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