A 1977 RCA VBT-200 playing on a 1954 RCA CT-100
 

I recently resuscitated an RCA (Panasonic) VBT-200, the first sold VHS machine in North America. It was introduced in 1977 and the manufacture date is 8 October, 1977.

I photographed the video from the VBT200 playing a Mary Poppins tape on my RCA CT-100 this evening.

That looks really great! Did you have to make any modifications to eliminate flag waving at the top? :thmbsp:

No modifications needed. The output of the VBT-200 is remarkably stable and causes no bending with any tape I play.

That is interesting. Back in the early 90's I still had my folks early Sony(Zenith branded) Batamax, that also never showed any stability issues on old sets.

I had the exact machine, VBT-200. I gave it to my neighbor. What do you suppose they are worth? I seem to remember the bearings in the head motor started howling. I disassembled it, cleaned & lightly oiled the bearings & it worked fine again. You could set the timer to start only, then would continue until the end of the tape. Don't forget to press the mechanical play + rec buttons first though. 2 speed only. The only picture issues that I recall is when the record timer was used. The unit would start recording before the heavy head was up to speed, LOL.

The interesting thing I found after I got it to play SP tapes was it would not play the LP tapes I had. It played LP tapes too fast.

What I found was Panasonic made the VBT-200 not long after JVC established the format. Panasonic on it's own without consulting JVC added the LP mode which is it would record/play half speed so a 2 hour SP tape would record 4 hours.

JVC was not happy and refused to adopt the Panasonic LP and instead put into their standard their own LP mode which was one third speed so a 2 hour SP tape would run 6 hours. JVC insisted other VHS makers as part of their licence agreement only use their LP mode (initially called Extra Long Play or ELP mode). JVC did however concede that licenced VHS machines would play the Panasonic LP mode tapes only.

Because all other VHS makers were on board with the licenced JVc long play mode, Panasonic was the one man out of step. Panasonic quietly dropped their LP mode in the mid 1980s although from 1980 to 1985 I believe they may have included the three record speeds eg SP, LP and ELP. I have a 1994 Panasonic VHS machine with an LP switch which is in actuality an ELP speed switch. It is however labelled LP!

So the VBT-200 records half speed which suggests higher quality and the VBT-200 LP tapes will play on all later VHS machines including machines that cannot themselves record the half speed format!

First one we ever got in the shop was in '79, a Zenith top-loader, with a seized motor. One of the shop goofballs, having never seen inside one before, said "hey the video head's on catty-wampus." :lmao: ,
Disassembled motor, cleaned & oiled bearings, and sent it home, cattywampus head notwithstanding.

I've played both the CED selectavision disc intros on my CT-100/21CT55 and some of the video is on my YouTube/Flickr.

From what I have read betamax was designed in such a way that it couldn't flag wave up top... I've got many beta decks and haven't seen one do it.

The 4 hour LP speed never fully left VHS. I have late 90s VHS decks from sharp and other brands that can record at all 3 speeds... Sometimes it's nice having an in-between speed when you need more than 2 hours on one tape, but want the best quality you can get doing it.

A few years ago I read that later in VHS' run (sometime in the 2000s) someone made their own standard that could get more than 6 hours (I think it was like 8-10) out of a T-120. JVC never supported it and other makes never picked it up...I hear picture quality was as lack luster as you'd expect.

Can you confirm that? I read that JVC forbade the Panasonic LP mode and I looked subsequently for other machines that would record the 4 hour mode but could not find any. On the otherhand, I tested four hour tapes I made on the VBT-200 and they play elsewhere.

I would be grateful if you could list specific makes and models

Interesting about that additional speed; I suppose the majority of my recording has been on one Panasonic or another, with a beaten store-demo Emerson being my daily in between.

In my collection I have a couple VHS tapes with a bunch of dates written on them. They will play, badly, on my best VCR...I think I had to use the slow motion feature. What are they? ATM security tapes, maybe from the early 90s, and recorded at a VERY slow speed. Not the most exciting movie you've seen!

I'm not at home to read the model number right now, but my first VCR (an economy model Sharp my parents bought new for my birthday in the mid 90s definitely has all 3 recording speeds (and I used all 3 speeds for time shifting/archiving with it). I only switched to DVD time shifting in 2012 so it's still fairly fresh memory. I believe my Sharp S-VHS deck (bought it used after 2012 because the other Sharp was so reliable) also has it.

I would like to know how that worked without a time-base corrector. I can't think of a way you could guarantee the horizontal phase to match before and after the vertical head switch. I'd think it would be very sensitive to tape tension.

There is a slight flag wave at the top of frame. But because it is so low, I suggest the on this early machine, the mechanical tolerance were perhaps tighter?

But you do see the characteristic flag at the top and the head switch at the bottom of frame but they are not obvious.

I'd also expect better results playing tapes recorded on the same machine than ones from a different machine.

I agree. Although I did play a commercial Disney tape.

The CT100 uses the synchroguide afc system which generally makes it prone to timebase errors. So I remain curious.

I will do some tests to find out.

So I tested playback with other commercially recorded tapes. The Mary Poppins tapes appears very compatible with my VBT-200. However playing other tapes, there is a fair degree of variance. Some play well and others less so. The worst case was a Columbia House Tape from the early 1990s which displayed a noticable flag wave which in the worst case was noticable about 10% of the top of picture. Best case was a tape which displayed no flag waving at all.

The RCA VBT-200 was definitely the first VCR sold with the LP speed, but the first VHS machine was the JVC HR-3300U, in early 1977. If I remember the details right (because I was following all of this stuff constantly as a teenager then, the way a "normal" guy follows sports or girls or whatever), RCA wanted a video recorder that could hold an entire NFL football game on one tape, and JVC would have said "no" but their corporate parent Matsushita said "yes". RCA got their VBT-200 on the market, and Matsushita's Panasonic brand sold it as their PV-1000. I have forgot now if there were other versions/"clones" of that two-speed machine.

Two years after the VBT-200, the Super Long Play/Extended Play "six hour" speed arrived in the Panasonic PV-1200 and RCA's VDT series, and a whole bunch of "clones". I remember these brands for sure: Quasar, GE, Magnavox, Curtis Mathes, Philco, Sylvania, J.C. Penney, and probably Montgomery Wards. (If you know of other brands of that rotary-tuner, angled-front two- or three-speed VHS machine, please let me know.)

Now, almost fifty years later :eek:, the "VCR wars" seem almost comical, with all of the constant leapfrogging and partisanship, but they sure did spur the manufacturers to make lots of impressive improvements in home video recording technology and performance very quickly.

I do not remember hearing of JVC "forbidding anyone" from doing anything, but they definitely never made any VHS machines that could record in the LP speed. JVC was also a/the supplier of VHS machines to Zenith, so I presume that those are SP/EP recording machines only, also. It would surprise me if any Matsushita-built VHS machines after the PV-1200 could -not- record in LP, though, except maybe once Super VHS arrived. (I never had one in those days, myself.)

I remember the "flag-waving" problem affecting Zenith color TV sets more than anyone else's, to the point that they designed and sold an entire replacement module for a big group of their sets. Slower-speed and/or "borrowed/rented" tapes were always most likely to cause the problem.

From my first B1-only machine in fall 1979, no Beta VCR I ever had/used did not have some horizontal instability (what "flag waving" actually is, but on a much smaller level here) at the head-switching point near the bottom of the video frame on all machines, so I do not know what any specific design might have been to keep that from affecting slow-response TV sets to the point of visibility past the vertical sync (and thus, "flag waving"). I never had a VHS machine in those days to compare the head-switch video stability.