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Old 05-25-2007, 12:36 PM
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dr.ido dr.ido is offline
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My newest toy - Panasonic AG-7750 VCR

I need another VCR like I need another hole in my head, but I couldn't resist this :



A Panasonic AG-7750 SVHS editting VCR. It's ex defense department, who knows how it ended up at the local junk auction. I almost didn't pick it up after reading "worn heads" on the attached service tag from when it was retired in 2006. I set it up and stuck in a random test tape and VHS has never looked so good (having an internal TBC helps). I doubt I'll ever use half of it's features, but it looks really cool!

It's sitting on top of the Chyron VP-2 character generator that came with it. It didn't come with it's keyboard, but I may be able to get it working with an old XT keyboard. Internally it appears to be a stripped down XT PC driving a TMS9929 VDP (the same graphics chip used in MSX computers). If I still had an MSX system I'd be tempted to try hooking it up to its analog board to play Parodius in broadcast quality.
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Old 05-25-2007, 02:18 PM
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Serious stuff! I enjoy going to hamfests and they always have piles of equipment like this. I never know what even half of it does, only that it cost somebody a small fortune when new! The last time I went to one they had racks of vcrs like this that were U-Matic? I came close to dragging one home.
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Old 05-25-2007, 04:35 PM
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I went to factory training for that same model/series years ago,they are loaded with surface mount capacitors that WILL be bad,the bad caps can show problems like bad heads,but actually panasonic found you can really double the number of head hours before replacement,it is in editor with flying erase heads,and trust me.. you will want to recap all of the boards,even remove sheilds around head preamp..all will hive High ESR and they smell horrible once you heat them up to remove them.. but there is a trick to removing them,you can simply "twist" them at the base and pop them off,but rarely you can pull a trace,there is not much solder holding the surface mount caps for this reason,they were held in place by a type of glue before the boards went thru a wave soldering bath..you have to have a video monitor hooked up to "monitor out" to get to the menu and service menu area..
brings back memories of the 90's..LOL
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Old 05-27-2007, 02:37 AM
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dtuomi dtuomi is offline
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I've spent a lot of time with this model of Panasonic VTR. They sort of soured my taste for Panasonic equipment. It seems that if the power supply goes bad, be prepared to build a new one. You can't get a replacement for love or money. And the sad part is that they had become unobtainable like when these were still pretty new decks. Its almost like as soon as the smaller DS series cousins came out they had abandoned supporting this design. Other than that, its a great VTR. It really makes good video, and it comes the closest to any VHS style machine I've encountered to doing frame accurate editing.

David
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Old 05-27-2007, 04:54 AM
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As wiseguy said it is probably due for some new caps. I haven't opened it up yet, so I don't know what I'm in for yet.

In a commerical environment where the cost of down time has to be considered I can see where replacing the entire power supply rather than repairing it would be viable.

I find it cheaper to repair the existing board rather than replace it.

I've encountered this with recent gear often enough. Try to order certain components from local suppliers and they'll ask you for brand/model then tell you that the parts aren't available, but a replacement board is $$$. Even when I had to replace almost every component on the primary side of the power supply in a DVD recorder that was killed by a spike it was still less than half the cost of a replacement power supply.
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Old 08-05-2007, 04:39 PM
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I want one too!
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Old 08-07-2007, 09:47 PM
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Did you ever get the VP-2 working with an XT keyboard? I was curious to know if that would work, I've seen a few VP-2's around without the all-important keyboard.

David
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Old 08-07-2007, 10:38 PM
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I hooked up an XT keyboard and it sort of worked, but some of the scan codes must be different. I could enter a number at the menu that is displayed on power up, but I couldn't get out of that menu by pressing any key on the keyboard. Whatever scan code the VP-2 uses for "enter" there isn't single key on the XT keyboard that generates it. I don't remember if I tried doing alt/numpad combinations.
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Old 08-08-2007, 01:42 AM
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If I remember correctly, I think the real VP keyboard uses a key on what would be the number pad to go into and out of the menu. I'll try to dig up a VP-2 out of storage where I work and send a picture, maybe that might help decode the key sequence.

David
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