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Originally Posted by probnot
Just got this beast up and running. Wondering if anyone knows any interesting info about this era of Fisher VCRs.
I know that Sanyo owned Fisher at this time, so it would have been manufactured in Japan by Sanyo. But when this was made (1982ish) Sanyo was on team Beta, so am I right in assuming this was a unique VHS mechanism? The early Sanyo VHS VCRs I've seen are quite different.
I also remember reading that these early Fisher VCRs were notoriously unreliable (specifically the idler assembly). Not sure if this is exact model is included with that as the idlers all work well and even the tires were in decent shape.
This one does seem to have a pretty big flaw. The motor that moves the tape guides will keep going indefinitely until it detects they are in place. There is no time-out. So if a belt jams up (which I think happened to this one) the motor will just keep going. Even if you turn off the power switch, the power LED stays on, driving the motor. One of the transistors that drives the motor (into the "stow" position) was burnt up and I suspect this is why.
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I think I worked on one of these VCRs before (the one I worked on though was a Sharp branded unit) but I definitely remember the wired remote unit, and the one I worked on the drive mechanism worked perfectly yet, the problem was with the head/playback electronics as when it would play a tape it would playback in black and white only and with a slightly fuzzy looking picture, and I couldn't figure out why.
I also worked on a Panasonic VCR from the same time period (that had a knob style tuning mechanism rather than an electronic veractor style tuner) that had the same issue where the picture was black and white only in playback mode.
it was a rather weird symptom because I had never seen a VCR that played back in black and white like that as a mode of failure before, mostly mechanical failures were what i had seen up until that point which were usually belt related failures.