Stock up on VHS VCRs when can
 

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In the past year I've probably seen several hundred VCRs for less than $5 each. Seems there's ten at every thrift, and two at every garage sale. The only difference is that the garage sale ones usually have a remote. I wonder what happens to all the remotes at the Salvation Army? They must have hundreds of them somewhere in the back.

The older, good units already seem to be harder to find. About all I find around here are the '90's and later Funai built units. I do have a late '90's Sharp, a mid '80's front loading Panasonic, an early '80's top loading Panasonic, a cheapie Magnavox VCR/DVD combo, and a cheap Funai built Sanyo VCR. I've also got an early '80's Hitachi top loader that needs belts.

My friend that sells at the flea market gets $10-$15 each for his working VCR's; and, usually has no problem selling them. There are still plenty of people out there with VHS collections and they have probably figured out that most of what is available new is cheap junk.

The used-audio warehouses here churn through LOTS and LOTS of them, although lately I'm seeing (in relative terms) a higher percentage of DVD (VCD, CD...) players compared to VHS players, which are gradually reducing in numbers. Still, if someone wanted them I could probably pick up several thousand VHS players --enough to fill a 20' shipping container or so-- in anywhere from a few days to a month or so.

I already keep a couple spares on hand for the long-term, since they are so cheap, but am not worried about them becoming un-find-ably rare in the near future. Maybe several years (a decade or so) in the future, they'll be hard to find, but not yet. Better not to wait until it is too late, though, if you definitely want to be able to keep playing those tapes.

The units worth stockpiling are the well-built ones with "hi fi" sound quality. Probably best to pick a good model you like, and then get several extras of that exact same model. That way, you're more likely to have the spare parts to keep units going for as long as possible.

I always wondered the same thing myself. How do you have 15-20 VCRs on the shelf and only one with a remote?

Hey don't blow my secret! I saw it coming last year and I've been doing just that. Getting some good / great machines on the cheap. If some people have hundreds of CDs or LPs someone else must have hundreds of VHS tapes. I hope I'm not getting too market oriented here but with a karma perspective people looking for a good machine can find one much better than the deplorable combos that you can only get.

I've been stockpiling them for a couple of years now. The nice older machines can be had for next to nothing.

I'm sorry to say, but there are 10 times out of one more VCRs to find and buy used on eBay than CRT tube TVs. I am overstocked with vintage VHS VCRs right now that they are missing their matching vintage CRT TVs that I cannot find.

I found my Zenith VCR at Goodwill with remote for $10. Model VRE-205 from the late 80s I believe, totally mint cosmetically and functionally. Very high quality, heavy, well-built machine. I don't use VHS tapes though, just use its Cable tuner. I haven't found any others quite as nice, but there are dozens of newer models around for <$10, probably most of which work fine.

Shelf Life?
 

Can anyone tell me how long pre-recorded tapes are good for? I was wondering if the signal would fade away in storage. I hope not; I've a wonderful old VCC (video compact cassette) machine that still works plus a few brilliantly un-PC cartoon tapes that I doubt will ever be broadcast again. I don't know if this format made much headway outside Europe; tape cartridges were only slightly larger than VHS but played both ways like an audio cassette. Definition was better than either VHS or Betamax but being late to market, VCC never really caught on.

Must be 40 or 50 at the thrift store near me!

000

We took a long, leisurely drive Saturday. Stopped at a yard sale along the way, picked up a late 60s Westinghouse table model stereo for a buck. Not as interesting as the other thing I bought there, same price: a GTE Sylvania "Color Video Recorder", 2-speed VHS built in the spring of '78 by Matsushita. Very ragged, will take hours of cleaning inside, but a good project none the less. Will have to post a pic when I get a chance. Seller thought it was an 8-track player!

I do need to pick up another good quality vcr. I junked our old mid-80s Panasonic, not realizing at the time how good a unit it really was. (had power supply issues) I picked up a high-end Sony from early this decade but it has lots of glitches. Maybe the next old workhorse I see, I'll buy it and try rebuilding it. (like I need another project)

Well considering how many VCRs there are out there, I doubt they'll become very rare anytime soon (but you never know... newer VCRs don't last worth a crap after all).

I bought a nice late '80s Sony for $30.00, and I also have a nice brand new Panasonic higher end VCR (bought new in 2004... also bought the extended warranty, which was a bad idea, because here it is 3 years after it expired, and still working flawlessly).
I doubt it's gonna kick the bucket anytime soon, because I dont use it all that often, and it really is a good VCR.

The Sony is a 2 head base model, and produces that typical 2 head fuzzy grainy picture (even after cleaning the head), but still works great.

Most of the VCRs I've seen are newer BPC though. if I do come across an old top loader though, you better believe I'm snatching that sucker right up! I love those old beasts. We had one when I was a kid, and I remember it had coloured buttons on the front, and our TV stand at the time had a shelf that rolled out so you can access the tape door on the top, but it didn't have stoppers on it, and every once and a while I remember my mom rolling it out too far and the VCR would come crashing down face first on the floor LOL... which might possibly explain why we had to get a new VCR.

Say what you want about BPC VCRs but they do have one advantage over the old stuff, fewer rubber parts and fewer moving parts to gum up.

Most of them have cheap plastic parts that don't have any grease to get gummy, I expect they might survive ten or fifteen years stashed away in a closet better than one from the 70-80s, provided the caps don't all dry up of course.

My oldest series of VHS tapes are the ones in which I taped The Donna Reed Show off of Nick-At-Nite, I guess about 1989 or 1990. I also inherited a dozen VHS tapes of Leave It To Beaver as taped off of WNEW TV Channel 5 New York, from 1985 (they were bought by Fox TV January 1986). All these tapes still play just fine.

As far as VCRs - I have a 1992 RCA. It's fine but I don't use it anymore and it's in the original box in a closet. I bought a JVC DVD/VHS combo thing off of fleaBay about 5 years ago and I basically use it because I switch back and forth, some things I saved on VHS and some of the newer tv shows on DVD.

I think that the way the Obama administration wants everything old to be trashed (such as their program to scrap refrigerators built before 1995 and the "cash for clunkers" program, which means cars made before 1998 - well...they want us to trash everything vintage. Maybe this is their way to make consumers spend money to buy newly made junk. It's scary to wipe out our history but we live in these times. Maybe next they will say that VCRs are unsafe (LOL) and everyone has to scrap them and only use DVDs! In any case, I'd keep a few of ANYTHING vintage you can afford to keep now and hang onto them.

You can still buy VCRs with digital tuners, I guess they're not going away anytime soon.

Bought a nice HS-U80 recently, without the remote though... :cry:

Always looking for CLEAN bpc vcr's at thrift and estate and yard sales.
Seldom find nice ones though, usually scratched and dent models, yellow'ed with nicotine and sticky from little childrens fingers with candy and soda pop.

Recently fell into 2 early 80's Sony betamax vcr's, PRISTINE contition, in original boxes and wrapping and packing. Hell even the boxes and packing are pristine. Anyone know what they are worth? I don't own a single beta tape, never have, never will.

Still searching for the early RCA Selectavision VHS machines to match my RCA consoles. Any new 30$ vcr will produce an infinitely better pix and be trouble free, but would still like to have a pair just the same.

We still use a successor of beta...digibeta...at work (advertising), archiving commercials.

000

Interesting point. We've got the same program just started here (U.K.). So far it's for cars only and you have to have owned the clunker for 12 months or more but even so, saving £2000 off the price of a new car means the supply of cheap old cars for your kids to learn to drive on is drying up.

67Zenith and andy

Thanks for your assurances. As to the VCC, mine's badged GRUNDIG and even with a plastic case, it weighs a ton. When you look inside you can see why. There may be the odd IC hidden in there somewhere, but what you see are half a dozen full size stacked circuit boards with hundreds of discrete conponants on each one. Plus a heavily engineered tape transport and a good size mains transformer. Built to be serviced, not thrown away.

I've got to clean the heads and get that old cartoon tape copied to DVD; one of the things on it is the first broadcast of "The Snowman" with David Bowie doing the voice over. His are the only words on it, the rest apart from one song from a very young Aled Jones is music and movement. It's on TV every Christmas, but the voice over is by someone else.

Scrap fridges made before 1995?! cars made before 1998?!

But trust someone who has enough cash in his dresser drawer alone to buy a brand new Lincoln to propose something like that.

And it wouldn't surprise me if they made it illegal to even own anything over 10 years old. They'll probabally have cops rade your houses and give people heavy fines for owning older electronics/appliances/etc.
That sounds a lot like Canada, actually. I can totally see the RCMP doing that. because of course, who cares about the rapists, murderers, gang members, etc, when there's hard working honest people driving older cars with slight exhaust leaks.
And here in Saskatoon, they actually have spot checks all over the city, and the cops pull every car over 10 years old and inspect it. I know someone who's car got pulled off the road because it had a small rust hole in the back, the battery wasn't strapped down with anything, etc.
He doesn't have a lot of money, so he bought some cheap POS with a million things wrong with it, and it needs constant servicing. But hey, it's under 10 years old. His old car was very reliable and never gave him problems.
Now he's in debt, but hey, at least the pigs are happy.

It's not like that everywhere. Here, you just need to get an inspection check when you buy the car, nothing else after.

Is that for every car you buy no matter what?

Because here in SK you only need a safety inspection if it hasn't been registered for over a certain number of years or it's been pulled off the road at some point.

Luckily, they don't keep track of pre-1980 VIN numbers, so I was able to plate my 1974 Ford LTD without an inspection even though it was pulled off the road because some son of a bitch decided it was a good idea to cruise the streets of Saskatoon with straight pipe.

Everything you buy used... They don't pull off cars though, at least, not without very good reasons.

If it's just the fact that someone has a large library of VHS (or Beta, for that matter), tapes, I say back it all up on a hard drive, or make DVDs, and forget trying to keep working VCRs around. Brand new ones in the box will fail to work from time, and it will be a lifelong burden to worry about always needing one. I see the future being all solid-state media; no tapes, or discs of any kind. You will have a one-type-serves-all media device, like an SD card or a thumb drive, and it will have room for zillions of hours of video, music, your tax and medical records, and whatever you want. Very soon too!

Now of course if the VCR thing is for nostalgia and you want to be able to have a working machine to play with, as we play with vintage TVs, then absolutely get the ones you want NOW while they still exist.

Charles

We need to meet in the middle somehow. In California, you can drive a car with bald tires, no steering wheel, broken windshield, body held on to rusted out chassis with zip-ties, and crabbing down the road sideways because it's so badly damaged from an accident, but it's perfectly legal if the car passes the smog test. There IS NO mechanical inspection in Caifornia for private cars and trucks. Thank goodness, there is for commercial heavy trucks and buses. I've driven along behind cars here with parts literally falling off; menaces on the highway. Heck; half of the cars here don't even have current license plates! And one more point: The older the vehicle, the less the smog inspection requires. Diesels are 100% exempt for any age, new or old, and all vehicles are exempt from all inspection if older than 1974.

Charles

Sting sang something about this...

Synchronicity is one of my favorite albums. And everyone thinks Every Breath You Take is a love song.

Exactly. it doesn't take a genious to listen to the damn song and realize it's about a guy stalking a girl, but all they hear is "Can't you see, you belong to me..." and think it's a love song. But to be fair, the masses are complete morons. Just look at the whole analogue-digital conversion, and I'll bet there's still people flipping through the channels and bitching to the TV stations wondering why their TVs don't work.

No, I interpret much more than that. But I'll leave you guessing then.

anyhow I've seemed to confuse my albums again. After a lite google session - It was Zenyatta Mondatta, When The World Is Running Down You Make The Best Of What's Still Around.

Where did you hear or read this? It's flat-out ridiculous. If this administration even tries to have legislation passed that would prevent anyone from keeping anything more than X number of years old, there would probably be a huge outcry from antique dealers and collectors the likes of which you wouldn't believe. I am specifically referring to antique radio and television collectors, such as those here at AK (Doug, drh4683, for one, myself, for another, et al.--I'm sure Doug won't give up his collection of Zenith TVs and I have about seven vintage Zenith radios here that I will not give up without a fight).

However, I don't think we have anything to worry about. Because there are so many antique dealers and collectors here in the US and Canada, such legislation as I mentioned above, if anyone in Washington is bold enough to introduce it, may not and probably will not even come close to becoming law.

I do not believe for a second, either, that VCRs will ever be declared unsafe by this administration. Why would or should they be? A law was passed in 1975 that gave the public the right to tape television shows off the air for their own use; people have been using VCRs for this purpose ever since. The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), enacted eight years ago, only outlaws recording television and radio programming onto digital media, then reselling the copies; it says nothing about people copying DVDs for their own use, although since most if not all commercial DVDs are copy-protected, such copying is all but impossible. I say "all but impossible" because there will always be some technically sharp and dishonest people out there who will figure out ways to circumvent the copyright law and defeat the copy protection schemes used.

The VHS/DVD players available for dirt-cheap prices at Big Lots, Best Buy, et al. are just that, playback devices only that do not have the capability to record off the air, as the dirt-cheap ones do not have ATSC tuners. DVD recorders with such tuners almost certainly carry warnings on their shipping boxes (and likely in their instruction manuals as well) against using the decks to copy commercial DVDs, either to a second DVD or to VHS; as a matter of fact, the ads for these devices in the Sunday newspaper flyers always carry a disclaimer that states "Does not duplicate copyrighted material." This probably (I would think almost certainly) means the recorder has at least one sensor and control circuitry that will detect Macrovision (and other copy-guard schemes) on commercial DVDs, will display a warning on the user's TV screen if copying is attempted, and will not allow the operation to continue.

Needless to say, the copying operation will fail, turning the blank DVD in the machine into a round piece of plastic unusable for anything except, perhaps, a coaster. If anything at all gets on the disc before the copying procedure is thwarted, it will almost certainly be an unwatchable mishmash of lines and distortion. The same basic system was used to prevent illicit copying of VHS videos in the '70s and '80s, when video rentals were just beginning. The Macrovision copy-guard system also makes it nearly impossible to use a VCR as an RF modulator for a DVD player; I am sure of this because I tried to use my Panasonic PV-4022 VCR as a modulator with my DVD player when the modulator I had been using went belly-up. The Macrovision copyguard signals caused the video to flash on and off on my TV screen after the disc had been playing about five minutes; eventually the screen went completely blank.

I thought I'd be clever and use my digital Sony handicam to record the analog signal from a DVD player. It does an excellent job digitizing analog.

Well, the DVD player output a Macrovision copy guard and the Handicam displayed a message on the screen saying that the source was copy protected and can't be copied. I was surprised that they bothered to make it recognize the Macrovision rather than just fail.

Well, they do want us to get rid of the old stuff to help the economy and the environment. But it's through incentives rather than bans. There would be big trouble if people had to give up their vintage cars, planes, TV, etc.

John

Getting rid of old stuff screws the environment twice. And collectors are a minority. The consumer is the majority with the desired resource. We're screwed. And if "they" try to impose a culture of forced disposal well then they can dispose of me. It is wise to preserve and foolish to destroy.

I'm surprised you didn't seem to have problems with Macrovision on VHS. Anyways, there are cheap boxes to defeat that.

Some DVD players have a menu option to ignore the Macrovision instruction on the DVD.

I saw a report on NBC-TV news last night (I'm writing this on July 10) that mentioned the Obama administration's "cash for clunkers" program. This is supposed to try to get older automobiles (more than five or ten years old) off the road; the program works (at least it is supposed to work) by offering owners of older cars a certain amount of money towards the purchase of a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle, in exchange for their old gas guzzler. However, the news report did say that the program had certain flaws which had to be worked out before it could be implemented. The news story is important enough that it will probably be in this morning's newspapers, as most of what is on any given evening's TV news will be repeated in the papers the next day.

The "cash for clunkers" program is aimed at getting old cars (only) off the nation's roads; it has nothing to do with anything else, so I think collectors of other types of antique or vintage devices are in the clear--at least for now. I'd keep an eye on the TV news and the papers for reports of new developments on this, however, as things have a way of changing literally at the drop of a hat--especially where our lawmakers in Washington are concerned.

Speaking of "cash for clunkers", I know an older lady who still drives either a '68 or '69 Dodge Dart. She bought it brand new and I can almost promise you that she'll keep it until she passes away. Her son tried to get her in a newer car and she asked him "why do I need a new car when the one I've got runs just fine and gets me where I want to go". Most everything else that she owns is 40+ years old, as well. The only thing she hasn't got (unfortunately) is old electronics.

Haa! Sounds like me (except for the electronics part.)

I'll admit this - after Katrina I truly wanted to rebuild my house exactly like it was new in 1964. I would have had the only period-correct house within miles. Unfortunately, prices were way up at the time and materials were scarce. Plus, my wife insisted on a new stainless kitchen. Cest la vie - I did manage colored porcelain in the bathrooms and original-type Armstrong floors among some smaller details.

Good for her! :thmbsp: The 68 or 69 Dodge Dart is a classic! :thmbsp:

That vehicle probably has a Slant 6 engine in it, which is known to run forever.