Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

[zandrax]

I was cleaning from dust my trusty VHS recorder, a 4 head Grundig VS620 class 1987, when I spot three bulged caps in the vrm board:



The bulging ones are Frako EPS 220 uF 25 V, black jacket with gray stripes: Frako is a German brand still present today, but I can't find any datasheet in its site nor any reference to EP and EPS series.
The vcr works fine, I could ask a friend to simply replace the caps but I can't find a good substitute without knowing thier specs: any idea?

Zandrax

[arneson]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

Nice of you to care about classic old stuff.
Those are exactly what fails on the machine.
Just meet or exceed the voltage and meet or exceed the capacitance, and use the best quality available to you. nothing critical about those power supply caps.
To bad she's not fifteen years older. I think they were called VRC's in 1972.

[zandrax]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

Nice of you to care about classic old stuff.
Those are exactly what fails on the machine.
Just meet or exceed the voltage and meet or exceed the capacitance, and use the best quality available to you. nothing critical about those power supply caps.

Thanks Arneson, I'll check for reputable and heavy-duty GP caps since these Frako don't seems low-esr ones: maybe Nichicon KMG or something like that if I can find them.
I want to repair it for 3 reasons:
- I have about 300 VHS which are enjoyable on a crt tv; the first tape I recordered was Disney's Pinocchio and I can play it after 21 years, while 3 years old DVD-R discs (mainly Verbatim and TDK ones) start to jump and glitch now. Better picture, worse reliability;
- VHS recorder are rare since 2007, mostly are DVD-VHS combo and those still available cost a lot (from 120 euro, about $180): not a big deal because I already own a DVD recorder;
- it still works: tracking is good, video heads are a bit scratched but spare parts are available at low prices (a new head costs about £18, capstan and rollers less than £1 each). Audio is mono and sounds awful (noisy and compressed), but stereo wasn't much better and Hi-Fi/NICAM models were too much expensive at the time ...

To bad she's not fifteen years older. I think they were called VRC's in 1972.

You're speaking of the Philips' Video Cassette Recording system, so VCR a.k.a. N1500 because the first player was the Philips N1500. Nice one, though it came too early on the market and it had three incompatible formats (VCR, VCR Long play and SVR) sharing the same physical cassette: not a smart move.

Zandrax

[i4004]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

- I have about 300 VHS which are enjoyable on a crt tv; the first tape I recordered was Disney's Pinocchio and I can play it after 21 years, while 3 years old DVD-R discs (mainly Verbatim and TDK ones) start to jump and glitch now. Better picture, worse reliability;

a lot of the vhs tapes will have so-called drop-outs. these are black or discolored lines that appear in image. they REALLY spoil the experience for me.
(for some reason those film scrathes(verticallines) are much more tolerable than horizinatal lines that drop-outs are). this problem was never really fully solved on vhs. they have drop-out compensators but these can only do so much. they cannot recreate too many damaged lines.
but today one can use pc to fix those vhs issues.
another vhs issue is inherent blur and vertical lines wiggle, offcourse.

i have no reliability issues with optical media thus far.
why don't you copy those with glitches to reliable media.
if standalone dvd-player has issues perhaps it's just its optics are crap.
ie if one player can't read it, others might.

overall, i can show you 3-4 year old dvdr media scans(done with liteon drives, which are not that good readers anyway..originally burned on burner with sanyo inside) that look better than pressed dvd media.

so anytime somebody sayd dvdr fails them i'm kinda sceptic; it's usually low quality media (which tdk can be) or too fast burning speed(4x should be safe, 8x is not), or crappy burner(1st generation burners are worse than those that come later) etc.
in that aspect i'm pretty happy with lg burners and verbatim or sony media.
oh yeah, one should keep any eye on them: do a scan of particular brand every so often and you should be safe.

also, it's not that hard to make 2 copies on two different brands, and chances of that being lost are pretty damn low.
in that aspect i believe optical media can preserve perfect quality for much longer, easilly...as vhs cannot preserve it fully at all.
in that aspect anything analog should be sigitized while it still works, as it won't last forever.
digital will last for much longer...as even when format is too old to be supported it can be emulated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

in iself, archiving is the main purpose i use the machines...
in that aspect main advantage of digital media(as i said) is easy copying. make few copies(perhaps one on external hdd that u use only rarely and one on optical media) and it's safe allright.

[zandrax]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

a lot of the vhs tapes will have so-called drop-outs. these are black or discolored lines that appear in image. they REALLY spoil the experience for me.
(for some reason those film scrathes(verticallines) are much more tolerable than horizinatal lines that drop-outs are). this problem was never really fully solved on vhs. they have drop-out compensators but these can only do so much. they cannot recreate too many damaged lines.
but today one can use pc to fix those vhs issues.
another vhs issue is inherent blur and vertical lines wiggle, offcourse.

Strange enough, drop-outs don't bother me much: after I cleaned the head with a cleaning tape, I got rid of most dropouts and image defects.
Vertical lines wiggle and picture is moderately blurred, I agree.

i have no reliability issues with optical media thus far.
why don't you copy those with glitches to reliable media.
if standalone dvd-player has issues perhaps it's just its optics are crap.
ie if one player can't read it, others might.

I think my dvd recorder (a Samsung DVD-R119) is unable to burn 16x discs, even quality ones such as Verbatim MCCs. I had only sporadic problems with Verbatim 8x media, but they aren't manifactured anymore so I'm stuck with 16x ones OTOH it records 1 and 2x DVD-RW without glitches, but these are more expensive than DVD-R and (main point) they are sensitive to magnetic fields, so aren't a good choice for long term recordings.
Another consideration: my player is quite sensitive to surface scratches and dvds get scratched too easily for my tastes.

[OT]I know TY media (heavy user of Verbatim Pastels cds in the old times, most are still readeable after 6 years); Liteons were good readers but they started malfunction if temps were too high (> 45 C if I remember correctly), LG-Philips sucked at the time and both Plextors and Yamaha F1 were the sought after. Now the world is going backwards: LGs are better than Liteons, Plextor simply rebrands Pioneer units, Nec was good before joining Sony in Optiarc, Yamaha is dead and Samsung is born. Quite funny ...[/OT]

in that aspect i believe optical media can preserve perfect quality for much longer, easilly...as vhs cannot preserve it fully at all.
in that aspect anything analog should be sigitized while it still works, as it won't last forever.

Are you sure? I think digital recordings are mostly an yes/no thing: they can preserve the original quality or, if something goes bad, they can lose completely without degradation. Analog media degrades over time so it can't be an high quality one while still being readeable most of times.

digital will last for much longer...as even when format is too old to be supported it can be emulated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

I'm not so optimistic: dead digital formats are a serious issue.
E.g. I have about three dozens of 5 1/4" floppies and few of them carry my text documents written with Olitext, a Wordstar-like text processor bundled with Olivetti personal computers in mid 80's: now Olivetti is dead since long, 5 1/4" discs and drives aren't manifactured anymore and noone knows the Olitext format's specs.
I'm lucky because I still own a floppy drive, an old computer with Dos and the program floppy; moreover Olitext can convert its files into plain ascii text, so I can save my old works: what could I do if, for example, the program floppy is damaged? I would have digital archives of my life which are perfect, but I couldn't read them no more: they'd be useless.
Think about early wax cylinder used in first voice recorders: they sound awful, nothing resembles the original voice but we can listen to them still today. We have paper encyclopedia which everyone can read; OTOH I have an old cd-rom encyclopedia, one of the first ones programmed for Windows 3.1: all files are saved into a database and the program reads it. Unfortunately it requires an old copy of a runtime environment which can't be easily installed on modern Windows os: the cd is readeable but is useless. Damn ...

Zandrax

[i4004]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

after I cleaned the head with a cleaning tape, I got rid of most dropouts and image defects.

good quality tapes have less dropouts. perhaps u used better tapes than i.
a particularly bad series was one type of kodak tapes.

I think my dvd recorder (a Samsung DVD-R119) is unable to burn 16x discs

standalones burn at 1x, so why would speed even matter?
also, i think you would be having better burns with decent pc drives, than such units.
dvd-recorders were plagues with all sorts of issues.

Another consideration: my player is quite sensitive to surface scratches and dvds get scratched too easily for my tastes.

yes, like i said standalones tend to have such issues. perhaps those dvdrs would work ok in pc drive.
in that aspect it's not fair to say dvdr is inferior to vhs, because standalone dvd recoprding seems to be continuing its unmature technology tendency...
they usually put cheapest pc drives they can find in those recorders....
though i think pioneer units gained some reputation as being ok.

heavy user of Verbatim Pastels cds in the old times, most are still readeable after 6 years

i have traxdata readable after 7-8 years...
like i said i have yet to find brand that's gone bad.
offcourse i was never buying the cheapest blank media.

Are you sure? I think digital recordings are mostly an yes/no thing: they can preserve the original quality or, if something goes bad, they can lose completely without degradation. Analog media degrades over time so it can't be an high quality one while still being readeable most of times.

not quite. only if beginning of the disc is destroyed you get nothing. if damage is on other parts of disc you can recover undamaged parts. also degradation won't happen overnight, so if you keep an eye on it(nero cd/dvd speed scans should suffice) you probably won't lose much, if anything.
but yeah, typically tape defects will destroy less because data is spread on big surface.
but digital media is surely not on/off thing, because even some rather crappy burnes can be recovered.
programs like this
http://www.geocities.com/marsoupilamis/
are handy.

and noone knows the Olitext format's specs.

olivetti archives went up in smoke?

what could I do if, for example, the program floppy is damaged? I would have digital archives of my life which are perfect, but I couldn't read them no more: they'd be useless.

yeah, but floppy is a good example of unreliability of old, magnetic way.
and yes, there were too many floppy standards.
today bluray burner can read cds. and we need to wonder if there will be anymore optical formats at all(like bill gates predicted). flash is gaining momentum etc.
but like i said in digital world copying is easy so just copy old fata to system du-jour.
offcourse, aim for most compatible formats...ascii text, jpegs, mpegs etc.

Think about early wax cylinder used in first voice recorders: they sound awful, nothing resembles the original voice but we can listen to them still today.

yes, but we can listen to them thanks to digital technology that is saving them.
also they're safer in this way
"Storage and Servers
All audio files (approximately 36,000 files, including master and derivative files) of the original cylinders are stored on the Davidson Library's Isilon cluster and use approximately 2.0TB of disc space. The website is hosted on a server running Linux, which communicates with the library's OPAC in realtime through Z39.50 to generate the searchable index. The files are streamed from a G5 Apple Xserve running Quicktime Streaming Server."

much safer.

without digital technology restoration of such
http://www.tvdawn.com/tv1strx.htm
things wouldn't really be possible.

also this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph
that's pretty damn impressive; even the inventor couldn't reproduce these sounds at the time!

these days chances of preserving our data are immense: storage space is cheap, so all you need is next generation being aware what needs to be preserved.
from such viewpoint mpegs, jpegs, and ascii txt files are easilly formats capable of lasting several hundreds years.
just copy them on new and ever-so-cheaper digital media of the day.

some time ago i watched some ms kernel developer demonstrate emulation of earliest windows versions. so the only possible problem can be no will to preserve the stuff.
and i think history will always be interesting to humans.

it's pitty that old formats were so crappy. i would like to see images of todays quality from 100 years ago.
now THAT would be fun.
i have this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN3LzbNieWI
capped from tv(surely looks better than youtube...heh..digital is not always improving things.....) but still, colors are off and image is blurry because of early film stock and cameras etc. but 10x better than b/w crap we're accustomed from that era, that's for sure.

it's a pitty we only have so lil color footage from 60(and more) years ago.
isn't it weird to see ww1 in colour
http://www.albertkahn.co.uk/firstworldwar.html
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky
some old pix from ny
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cush...%22New+York%22

digitization surely is best way to preserve this.
otherwise it won't be preserved, as simple as that.

Unfortunately it requires an old copy of a runtime environment which can't be easily installed on modern Windows os: the cd is readeable but is useless. Damn ...

sounds like something emulation could help with.
<wink>
something emlating win3.1 could put everything to one folder and just run it.

btw. just above you said you have old pc with dos.
can that run 3.1?

but yeah, sometimes such tasks can be non-trivial.
a proof in those days you didn't have "s" of "standardization".
that's why i avoid first generation of anything(better to wait and see will it catch on).
that and it costs more to buy 1st generation.

heh, reading all this made me think you're old man.
but still 10years younger than me....hehe....
anyhow i'm not really interested in those very old (by today standards) pcs.
because i'm into video pcs were just too slow for me before 2000.
internet was mostly crap before 2000 too, i believe.
(too lil content)
not interested in physical sense(i won't be getting any such hardware) but it's sure is interesting to track the development of pc ondistry as a whole.
infact i'm pretty interested in any device with capability to "conserve time".
because relying solely on human memory is rubbish.
humans desperately need reminders of all sorts.

in the end slight ontopic(lol!):
i have sanyo vhs machine from 1989, but panasonic that's much newer is just giving better picture, just like panasonic i bought in '95 that i threw off the balcony once it failed to priduce a signal during futurama. that really was its mortal sin!
offcourse sanyo has better mechanical build quality, but it always produce lines in areas of saturated red. i dunno why it's color reproduction was messed in such way.
tape recorded on it looked ok on pannys.

i don't have 300 tapes, but 150-200 i probably do.
stuff that's important will be digitized, or i'll found a better version on web, or i'll cap it again via tv-card. but yeah a lot of the stuff is rather unique and can't really be found anywhere else. people were buying vcrs mainly to watch tapes, not to record tv programmes. when they were recording they also erased old stuff with new one, ie it was just timeshifting(timer-record when you're not home, watch when you have time).

arneson said caps are what fails on vcrs, but vcrs mainly suffer from mechanical problems, electronics is usually much better when it comes to reliability in vcrs.

[zandrax]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

good quality tapes have less dropouts. perhaps u used better tapes than i.
a particularly bad series was one type of kodak tapes.

In early 90's my father tried almost every tape on sale so I have Scotch, Basf, Sony, TDK, Rhas and minor brands too; when I started recording in late 90's, I used to buy mostly Sony DX and V-Premium cassettes, the former for my little brother's cartoons and the latter for films. The most disappointing purchase was a box of six cheap chrome Irradio tapes: thin tape and lightweight cassette, those were a real p.o.s. ...

standalones burn at 1x, so why would speed even matter?
also, i think you would be having better burns with decent pc drives, than such units.
dvd-recorders were plagues with all sorts of issues.

I agree with you: moreover computer editing allows to remove ads, select your encoder and optimize the bitrate for a better picture. Anyway my family wanted a simple recorder, something easy to use since noone was into videoediting: the Samsung was the first recorder with a price tag inferior to 200 euro in 2005.

yes, like i said standalones tend to have such issues. perhaps those dvdrs would work ok in pc drive.
in that aspect it's not fair to say dvdr is inferior to vhs, because standalone dvd recoprding seems to be continuing its unmature technology tendency...
they usually put cheapest pc drives they can find in those recorders....
though i think pioneer units gained some reputation as being ok.

You're right, conclusions from a comparison between a vhs recorder and a dvd one are limited to those units only, they aren't general; I still wonder how much a good dvd burned with a good recorder will last. Some of early CD-Rs recordered 12-13 years ago are still readeable, will dvds last (say) 20-25 years?

like i said i have yet to find brand that's gone bad.
offcourse i was never buying the cheapest blank media.

A Basf cd-r unreadeable in 4 years and a Maxwell cd-rw following the same fate; early Verbatim Datalife start to be hard to read so I copied them.

not quite. only if beginning of the disc is destroyed you get nothing. if damage is on other parts of disc you can recover undamaged parts. also degradation won't happen overnight, so if you keep an eye on it(nero cd/dvd speed scans should suffice) you probably won't lose much, if anything.

Digital media can resist to a certain degree of degradation by saving redundant data: examples are Reed-Salomon correction in Audio cds and CRC in cd-roms and in hard disks. The correction is transparent to the user: in other words, most people don't realize their discs age or are scratched because the player corrects data; anyway when degradation is excessive, redundancy is no help at all and, "suddently", your media is partly or completely unreadeable. The on/off thing means that data correction hides all faults until they can't be corrected anymore, until is too late; analog formats, OTOH, degrades progressively.

olivetti archives went up in smoke?

Sort of: the brand collapsed in mid 90's and now, owned by italian telco Telecom Italia, produces only inkjet and dotmatrix printers. Most old docs got destroyed during the ownship change.

but like i said in digital world copying is easy so just copy old fata to system du-jour.
offcourse, aim for most compatible formats...ascii text, jpegs, mpegs etc.

Thats's all we can do: always copy on newer media and, if possible, using open and well documented formats.

yes, but we can listen to them thanks to digital technology that is saving them.
also they're safer in this way

Sorry to cut your wonderful examples, but it's better to keep my reply short: we could save them even using analog technology (transfering old records to a new format: old phonographs could be transferred to tape, celluloid films can be copied to acetate ones, books can be copied and photocopied). The strong points of digitalization is 1) data are independent from the medium and 2) computers can work on them in a short time (e.g.: you can filters pictures for defects in seconds while a correction by hand is long and can't guarantee the same result); the drawback is unreliability of mediums, which can be readeable until correction works.

it's pitty that old formats were so crappy. i would like to see images of todays quality from 100 years ago.

What do you mean with today quality? Today highest quality available?
Old state of art recordings can still boast a quality comparable or better than most today consumer stuff: are 6x6 photos from 1920's so ugly compared to today compact cameras? Seing the Shorpy archive and your examples, I'd say no most of times.

sounds like something emulation could help with.
<wink>
something emlating win3.1 could put everything to one folder and just run it.

btw. just above you said you have old pc with dos.
can that run 3.1?

Yes, an old Pentium 1 with the 5 1/4" floppy drive on which I already installed 3.1: it's useful for old dos games and some Windows programs that can only run on 3.1 or, by some extent, on the 9x line (e.g games using the WinG libraries, ancestors of actual DirectX).
The encyclopedia requires the 16 bit version of Quicktime 2.x for playing some animations (it's a 16 bit programs so it recognizes only the 16 bit plugin). Of course the 32 bit version can be installed on NT, 9x and maybe 2000/XP too, but the 16 bit works flawlessy on 3.1 and 9x only: in all pther cases I have to copy all qt dll from a working installation, losing the control panel and other niceties.
I still ask myself why the publisher did incorporate all contents into a single database-like file: external .mov files were both simpler to read (read them without having to dig into a database) and I could watch them even today. Early antipiracy countermesaures?

heh, reading all this made me think you're old man.
but still 10years younger than me....hehe....

I like to study the evolutionary steps in technology, so I often dig into the past.

anyhow i'm not really interested in those very old (by today standards) pcs.
because i'm into video pcs were just too slow for me before 2000.

For dvd video editing I agree, for lower quality content they were adequate.

internet was mostly crap before 2000 too, i believe.
(too lil content)

I started surfing in 1999, old times are hard to remember but I was happy Altavista always found something. There was good content (the old Nostalgia Retrocomputing site: it disappeared in 2003) and (maybe) less noise at the time.

infact i'm pretty interested in any device with capability to "conserve time".
because relying solely on human memory is rubbish.
humans desperately need reminders of all sorts.

I cannot but agree.

in the end slight ontopic(lol!):
i have sanyo vhs machine from 1989, but panasonic that's much newer is just giving better picture, just like panasonic i bought in '95 that i threw off the balcony once it failed to priduce a signal during futurama. that really was its mortal sin!
offcourse sanyo has better mechanical build quality, but it always produce lines in areas of saturated red. i dunno why it's color reproduction was messed in such way.
tape recorded on it looked ok on pannys.

No idea, but I'd check contacts (maybe are oxidized) and potentiometers on color channels, usually near the RF output. You should have a service manual handy before changing anything.

arneson said caps are what fails on vcrs, but vcrs mainly suffer from mechanical problems, electronics is usually much better when it comes to reliability in vcrs.

Most mechanical problems are simple: dirty or damaged pinch rollers, capstans and gears; snowy pictures due to dirty or worn heads; caps dead from age and heat. VHS and Betamax recorder were globally reliable (single brand reliability may vary), other formats such as Philips VCR (aka N1500) and Video2000 had a lot of trouble.

Zandrax

[i4004]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

Some of early CD-Rs recordered 12-13 years ago are still readeable, will dvds last (say) 20-25 years?

i hope they can, but can't be sure untill it happens.
with present rate of deteriration on high quality media(which i can't realy even measure with my liteon kprobe scans) i would say it can do better than that.

poor quality media should be copied ASAP.

early Verbatim Datalife start to be hard to read so I copied them.

how old? i have some datalifes made by cmc: some of the best cdr media i ever saw.
though i didn't check on them in a while...

The on/off thing means that data correction hides all faults until they can't be corrected anymore, until is too late; analog formats, OTOH, degrades progressively.

ah that. yes, that's true. ecc is double-sided sword.
btw. dvds have more of ecc than cdrs.

the drawback is unreliability of mediums, which can be readeable until correction works.

hdd i also a medium: let's say we have two identical drives in external (usb) cases and used only every so often.
i think reliability of such method is very high.
if one hdd dies, grab another ad copy stuff over again.

What do you mean with today quality? Today highest quality available?
Old state of art recordings can still boast a quality comparable or better than most today consumer stuff: are 6x6 photos from 1920's so ugly compared to today compact cameras? Seing the Shorpy archive and your examples, I'd say no most of times.

today p&s cameras are 10x better than top gear of those days. any of those pix(from shorpy archive) done with p&s in auto mode of today would look better. for starters you would always have color. one of the biggest disadvantages i see with old stuff is lack of color. links i posted are more of exception than a rule when it comes to those times.
b/w is just so unnatural to me. it's better than npothing, sure, but if the color process was applied form the beggining i would prefer such development.
essentially, b/w was cheap and photography people used it.

one might say that advantage of past times are good photographers(ie not everbody could take pix) etc. but that's not really true. it was niche product(beacuse of price and complexity) and today it's not. today you have many more pros, AND many more amateurs which automatically increases chances of good photos.
today you have literally thosands of amateurs making better pix(in ALL aspects) than pros of yesteryear.
for example such threads
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/...m/719000650931
host tons of excellent photos.

No idea, but I'd check contacts (maybe are oxidized) and potentiometers on color channels, usually near the RF output. You should have a service manual handy before changing anything.

the problem existed when vcr was new, so it's not a malfunction, but more of a design flaw.

Most mechanical problems are simple: dirty or damaged pinch rollers, capstans and gears; snowy pictures due to dirty or worn heads

ah..it would be easy if it was only that.
once plastic took place of metal all sorts of problems were appearing.
panasonic i threw off the balcony?
it actually had main lever broken(what can i say, i used vcrs like pro in the studio...very often rewinding fast forwarding etc. and these machines were not made for such abuse) and i've fixed it somehow(used pieces of metal to "burn-in" to plastic and stich it somehow. but it wasn't very reliable after that, and new main lever was too costly at the time.
problem i had with it was sometimes it wouldn't produce video and that might as well be casued by badcaps, but i needed working machine anyway....

BUT i'll dust-off old sany and try it for the tape i'm now converting, as this new panasonic can't really seem to get tracking fully right even when i manually adjust it.
tapes were done on sanyo so i guess chances exist.

panasonic had this flaw from the beginning
http://groups.google.com/group/aus.d...bc59b29630d3d7
so yeah around 2003 they've already hit the bottom...

just rechecking link on a signature of my post there...now it's
http://www.oz.net/~blam1/DiscoVision...ysPictures.htm
silver platter?
cd? dvd? hard-disk?
hehe...

[arneson]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

Funny, I've got a spool of silver wire that plays music
and one with some guy dictating a letter.
To bad I don't have the player,
I think it's up in the Eastman museum or else Edison had one.

[i4004]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

not steel wire?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdemar_Poulsen
hehe...

http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/
episode video recorder: they say they tried to make a copy of that machine, but heard nothing...

'secret life of machines'=one of my favorite tv programmes...

[arneson]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

I know it's obviously magnetic, so when I jokingly said silver I meant looks only.
Many years ago I had the suitcase style dictaphone recorder but this doesn't have anything to do with Zandreis Grundig or video media stuff.
It did however make me think of 'Sleeper', where Woody Allen is going out the window on a huge piece of computer tape.

[kc8adu]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

maybe we can play your wire on this.
http://www.porticus.org/bell/mirrorphone.html
yes i own one.they are very rare.

[zandrax]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

how old? i have some datalifes made by cmc: some of the best cdr media i ever saw.
though i didn't check on them in a while...

Well, I think 2000 or 2001: a friend of mine recorded them, I bought my first cd-rw in late 2002.

hdd i also a medium: let's say we have two identical drives in external (usb) cases and used only every so often.
i think reliability of such method is very high.
if one hdd dies, grab another ad copy stuff over again.

Hard disks aren't so reliable: weak sectors can be unreadeable and it's sensitive to falls, heat and magnetic fields. First perpendicual recording platters are quite unreliable too.
Magneto-optical discs were built to last for decades and they usually do: unfortunately drives don't last so long and almost nobody manifacture them anymore (Fujitsu stopped the 3.5" line some time ago, so Plasmon is the only manifacturer with their UDO discs), so sometimes you read about people looking for a specific Sony/Canon/Fujitsu drive in order to read their old 185-225 MB discs recorded in late '80s. In short, the only way to keep your data is copying them on newer (and hopefully more reliable) formats.

today p&s cameras are 10x better than top gear of those days. any of those pix(from shorpy archive) done with p&s in auto mode of today would look better.

Not with cheap compact cameras: most of them employs blurry lenses. I agree any digital reflex delivers better pictures, but point-and-shoot aren't so good.

for starters you would always have color. [...] b/w is just so unnatural to me.

I don't dislike b/w, it enhances geometry and shapes so it's useful for photographing buildings. It's unappealing when color is needed, e.g. portraits and landscapes.

today you have literally thosands of amateurs making better pix(in ALL aspects) than pros of yesteryear.
for example such threads
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/...m/719000650931
host tons of excellent photos.

Nice ones
[OT]Anyway I'm going to ask you: are today's amatours getting better pictures only because they have a better equipment or would they still be able do get good shots with older cameras? What does it matter, the man or the camera?[/OT]

the problem existed when vcr was new, so it's not a malfunction, but more of a design flaw. [...] so yeah around 2003 they've already hit the bottom...

Sorry for your Panasonic, I think it was a bad series like my Samsung isn't a great dvd recorder.

just rechecking link on a signature of my post there...now it's
http://www.oz.net/~blam1/DiscoVision/RecordPlaysPictures.htm
silver platter?
cd? dvd? hard-disk?
hehe...

No, DiscoVision aka Laserdisc: the most successful way of recording analog moving pictures on a disc (mechanical records on vinyl such as the german TeD and magnetic discs such as the CED weren't as successful as the DV/LD was). Until the dvd release of Blade Runner in 2006 I was thinking about buying one of those LD players ...

@ Arneson: your may be a Daily-graph wire recorder wire, the player records on magnetized steel wire as i4004 said. It was used in early answering machines, in dictaphones and in some recorders until reel-to-reel consumer equipment became available in '50s.

Zandrax

[arneson]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

Now I don't feel like the oldest fart anymore.
I did have a machine long ago but the wire actually sawed a deep grove thru the playback head due to some alignment issue.
The most fun was an old machine that accepted blank vinyl and allowed home made records to go along with your 8mm movies.
That grammy recorder was also a suitcase style device.
Those were the good old days,
but you still had to replace all the paper caps to make them work.

[zandrax]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

Now I don't feel like the oldest fart anymore.

Don't worry: I love to know old technology and how they evolved in time. This helps me to analyze.

I did have a machine long ago but the wire actually sawed a deep grove thru the playback head due to some alignment issue.
The most fun was an old machine that accepted blank vinyl and allowed home made records to go along with your 8mm movies.
That grammy recorder was also a suitcase style device.
Those were the good old days,
but you still had to replace all the paper caps to make them work.

Sorry for your wire recorder
I never saw a wire recorder live, nor a vinyl cutter though those exist (old Westrex were and are used for small productions): your old suitcase device seems a bit more than old Philips and Lesa turntables

Zandrax

[arneson]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

Everyone is now dusting off the old LP collection and plopping them onto the USB turntables.
Then onto the Ipod they go.
Old albums are going for a buck each and whole collections are being sold cheap.
The only thing you lose is the psychedelic jacket covers, which are also collectable.

[i4004]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

>Hard disks aren't so reliable

not when they're running 24/7.
but if you have 2 hdds that are never on at the same time and used relatively rarely, it's very safe.
that's the convenience of digital: easy copying.

>Not with cheap compact cameras: most of them employs blurry lenses.

uh...my canon powershot a610 beats anything we linked in this thread easilly(except that ars thread with recent photos).
and it beats it in auto mode, and not best resoluton it can do.
heck, i would say many of today's mobile phones do, even though they indeed have crappy lenses, do too much nr, etc.
vintage lenses and vintage film stock just looks like crap many times.
i watched "sunset boulevard" recently; in the same shot patches of film are properly focused and others are not....huh..
it's not like they picked the wrong thing to focus, it's just silly...

none of the vintage photos we linked really has good enough sharpness by todays standards.

overall if something's shot with small budget in 60s and 70s and it's colour, chances are it looks rather bad.
only top productions look good.
and the thing is, on small screen video looks better than film. downsizing the film so much(to bring it to tv) just makes it blurry....

>I don't dislike b/w, it enhances geometry and shapes so it's useful for photographing buildings.

so you wouldn't also like to see the color of the building too?
just shapes?
colour doesn't destroy geometry and shape it can only make it look more natural.
and if you need just geomatry make a grayscale copy and that's it.

>Anyway I'm going to ask you: are today's amatours getting better pictures only because they have a better equipment or would they still be able do get good shots with older cameras? What does it matter, the man or the camera?

both.
but old photographers just couldn't get such quality with their gear no matter what they did. they could do well, but not like todays photographers.
ie if you gave same photographer best old camera and best new camera shots would be better with new camera....offcourse both cameras used in manual mode, as old camera has not automatism anyway...
first thing he would spot would probabyl be: instant preview? sweet!
as he never knew what does he have on that film untill he develops it.
today this is just silly.

one can find many nostalgic and subjective reasons to love old photography, but not one reasonable and logical cause.
kinda like those edison cylinders vs. compact disc...

>Sorry for your Panasonic, I think it was a bad series like my Samsung isn't a great dvd recorder.

panasonic (about 2003) had explained mech problem(which i solved) and sanyo had red issues(both issues on new machines..heh): but now it seems to me perhaps only RF modulator was affected(ie didn't saw problem with reds while capping via composite, which i did just few days ago).

here's same frame from the two


i always had the feeling sanyo doesn't have drop-out compensator at all.
but it has ok image where panasonic has issues with locking the vertical syc.
so my best bet is to use sanyo only when panasonic fails...

otherwise i'll have plenty of drop-outs if i use sanyo only.
if local stores had any sony vcr i would probably buy one, but it seems those days are gone...
somebody still sells jvc s-vhs machines for about 230€, but that seems too expensive because i'll be buying one "s" that i don't need, and essentially i don't need recorder at all, but it has some feature that should help with old tapes etc(they call it "best"
"The Biconditional Equalised Signal Tracking (B.E.S.T.) System checks the
condition of the tape in use and compensates during recording and playback
to give the best picture quality possible." )

autotracking would need to be constantly refreshed to deal with these tapes, because not everythign was recorded on same vcr, and even if it was, that vcr had different conditions(at one time pinch roller was changed but it was not turning as easilyl asit should etc.), and i don't know if any vcr has constantly refreshed tracking.

in other words, i can't be sure at all if i would have better results with new machine.
probably not...
better idea would be to find used vcr and then try it there...
but the chances are it's the tapes themselves.
but if i notice same problem with many tapes i'll probably do something.
i dislike drop-out and i dislike loss of v. sync.

>No, DiscoVision aka Laserdisc

it was a joke: hdd platter, cdr and dvdr all usually have some "silver" surfaces...

btw. do you know about "LVD", without asking google?

here's one more interesting link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tele-snaps

heh, prior to having cd burner i was outputting web collected .jpg images to tv-out and record that on vhs tape...
these days i photograph teletext pages(rarely though) as it's easier than to find good tv-card ttx software...

[zandrax]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

uh...my canon powershot a610 beats anything we linked in this thread easilly(except that ars thread with recent photos).
[...]
none of the vintage photos we linked really has good enough sharpness by todays standards.

I think your Canon is way better than my old HP (almost everything is better than a HP camera ) and my father's Fujifilm: the latter boast a wide wideangle (equivalent to a 24 mm in 35 mm world), but pictures are blurred, vignetting is evident and sometimes autofocus don't work as expected. Damn cheap lenses ...

overall if something's shot with small budget in 60s and 70s and it's colour, chances are it looks rather bad.
only top productions look good.

Color is something different from lens quality: films are based on chemical reactions so there is some degradation over time and, if you notice it, usually colors are related to fashon at the time of shooting.

A few examples: first color films appeared in late '30s (e.g. Snow White, 1937), in '40s and '50s they slowly matured [Hitchcock had to reshoot last segments of Rope (1948) because color fidelty wasn't assured: the sunset looked too satured and (from "The making of Rope", DVD extra) clothes' colors seemed good only for a carnival: early Kodachrome effect?].
By late 1950s and early 60's color was good enough for serious shooting: at the time pastel color were preferred for furnitures, house paints, car paints (e.g. Chevrolet Impalas had a peculair light blue) so movies and photos of the time usually have delicate colors or pastel tones. Think at colossals or, if you like Hitchcock as I do, The man who knew too much (1956).
By late '60s and early '70s there were student movements, hippies and, of course, psychedelic colors, violent pairing of bright colors (Lamborghini Miura had a yellow so strong I nicknamed it "antifog yellow" , but FIAT even abused orange with the 127) or earth tones, like a new and time-limited Liberty period. It wasn't unusal to wear white-red-blue jackets and have a brown-yellow-orange wallpaper near a dark grass green walls; oak and dark wood furnitures were ubuiquitous. This remembers me a minor italo-british sci-fi series, Space 1999 (1975), and their earth-tones space suits which contrasted with bright light-walls.
With late '70s and early '80s I enter into the darkness kingdom: dark suits, dark blue and black cars (who said Knight rider?) with dark light glasses, black plastic electric appliances, tv sets and hi-fi gear. Dark times, maybe due to USSR vs USA arm fight, the fear for a 3rd world war, the 1984 economic crisis: most of these events happened before I was born. Anyway ET (1982) and Back to the future (1985) are dark enough for my tastes.
Late '80s and we change again: pastel colors brought by Miami vice, then brighter ones. Then crossing '90s and coming to present day ...

so you wouldn't also like to see the color of the building too?
just shapes?
colour doesn't destroy geometry and shape it can only make it look more natural.
and if you need just geomatry make a grayscale copy and that's it.

It's hard to say when colors are needed and when they distract from shapes: city skylines can be expressive near noon in b/w becuase this emphasize contrast, at night you need colors due to lights. Building details such as joints of steel pillars and beams works a lot in b/w because all you need is geometry, color is unnecessary; OTOH famous and hystorical buildings are usually better in color.
Yeah, if digital color photos don't suit then you may turn into b/w ones, maybe controlling red, green and blue channels one by one.

both.
but old photographers just couldn't get such quality with their gear no matter what they did. they could do well, but not like todays photographers.
ie if you gave same photographer best old camera and best new camera shots would be better with new camera....offcourse both cameras used in manual mode, as old camera has not automatism anyway...
first thing he would spot would probabyl be: instant preview? sweet!
as he never knew what does he have on that film untill he develops it.
today this is just silly.

I agree: photographers spot good sights, better cameras shoot beter photos.

one can find many nostalgic and subjective reasons to love old photography, but not one reasonable and logical cause.
kinda like those edison cylinders vs. compact disc...

Well, at present day good film cameras are a small niche while digital ones have the 80+% of the market (spare parts are monouse cheap camera) and this is well deserved. My thought is digital cameras are handy (istant preview is a good thing so you know when reshoot), ccd sensors have a very good resolution, near if not superior to film one, but most of them have to improve a bit their dynamic range. Fuji has the SuperCCD approach while other digital reflex manifacturers started to employ HDRI (more shoots at different diaphragms later combined into a single image) to get landscapes at sunset without a burnt sky or a too dark ground: in a couple of years I'd be pleased to see big improvements in consumer ccds about dynamic range more than mere ISO speed.

here's same frame from the two


i always had the feeling sanyo doesn't have drop-out compensator at all.
but it has ok image where panasonic has issues with locking the vertical syc.
so my best bet is to use sanyo only when panasonic fails...

I see: the Panasonic is a bit noiser and has vsync issues, while the Sanyo has a cleaner image with a damn striking line ...

if local stores had any sony vcr i would probably buy one, but it seems those days are gone...
somebody still sells jvc s-vhs machines for about 230€, but that seems too expensive because i'll be buying one "s" that i don't need, and essentially i don't need recorder at all, but it has some feature that should help with old tapes etc

Were Sony VCRs so good? I heard big words about JVC pro equipment, D-VHS and some S-VHS ones, with autotracking, some defect management and such: unfortunately they were sold only to tv stations and cost a lot even used (you've to sell a kidney, I'd say).

in other words, i can't be sure at all if i would have better results with new machine.
probably not...

Never say never: as a thumb rule, professional or prosumer gear is quite good or at least better than same time consumer stuff; I'd buy those made in early 2000s (1999-2002), when DVD still was a new thing, disc recorders costed "an arm and a leg" and VHS was still the king.
A better recorder can't read badly recorded tapes like pristine ones, but at least it'd have less dropouts, no or little tracking issues: you can extract all infos you can from tapes.

it was a joke: hdd platter, cdr and dvdr all usually have some "silver" surfaces...

I get it now

btw. do you know about "LVD", without asking google?

Man of little faith! I think it was the Laser Video Disk, the MCA Discovision's twin developed by Philips before they joint togheter, or another acronim for the Laserdisc. Or it was Low Voltage Differential signaling, used from SCSI 2 controllers and disks?

And no, I didn't read Wikipedia either. A few years ago I researched a bit about the Laserdisk because I wanted to see Blade Runner Director's cut, at the time released only in LD so I got into the Total Rewind museum and other thematic sites.
Anyway, first laser disc attemps started in late '60s - early '70s: laser was still something new and expensive to build into a consumer gear, more expensive than tapes. There are rumors saying they were spinoff from a military device, suspects but no proofs.

Now I know tele-snaps, thanks for the link.

Zandrax

[i4004]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

i wasn't aware of your last post here untill today, when i got back to thread to check what was i saying of sanyo(because i got one grundig vcr to try...vsync is good, will have to check dropouts against panasonic capture i did...this grundig is not mine...i cleaned its heads but that wasn't the problem...when i first turned it on i saw one (right-side) roller-guide ( http://www.kellerstudio.de/repairfaq/sam/vcrxprt.gif ) extracted, but missing the tape around it...and now it works ok..i didn't even had the real chance to see how the hell is that possible, because tape would have to be real high in order for guide to miss it...)

seems "new posts" forum function is not perfect...

movie colors? yes, i've noticed that but to put it into its time is new perspective to me, and i would say it's good explanation.

70s stuff mostly looks orange to me, and that's why i love it.
i asked myself why did they give it such tint, and yeah, time it was happening is a good explanation.

bttf is one of my all time favs....all 3 parts.
because that movie is so much more than just a sf story.

about dynamic range: i've read recently that film can be recovered even when it's blown out...
"Film can often have areas of extreme overexposure but still record detail in those areas. This information is usually somewhat recoverable when printing or transferring to digital."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposur...hy)#Highlights

kinda suspicious to use "somewhat recoverable" once you say "still record detail in those areas"?
is it recoverable or not?
probably not if you blow it out enough...

I see: the Panasonic is a bit noiser and has vsync issues, while the Sanyo has a cleaner image with a damn striking line ...

sanyo is actually probably a bit noisier(has higher contrast...which is weird because sanyo was usually recording with lower contrast...i think it's this panasonic crystal view control system that decreases contrast when it sees much noise...and sanyo has same contrast for any tape...contrast is essentially video signal level...panaposnoic seems to back off from amplifying bad recordings too much, and that's ok strategy..)

the line, yeah...you can see why i'm bothered with it...all red, and then this crap appears...and it's not less distracting if screen is not uniform color at all...it's always bad to see discolored line...

Were Sony VCRs so good? I heard big words about JVC pro equipment, D-VHS and some S-VHS ones, with autotracking, some defect management and such: unfortunately they were sold only to tv stations and cost a lot even used (you've to sell a kidney, I'd say).

sony wasn't so good, i would try anything.
i have a friend with sony and some of his recordings looked surprisingly good when i watched them.
it has some system to analyze the tape prior to playback etc.
i was looking at new sony machines and didn't find it mentioned how it actually takes few seconds to anaylze tape first, so perhaps they threw that out and went cheap chinese way...
i think it was part of 'trilogic' system....new machines also have trilogic, but dunno if it's same thing...probably not...

i don't really enjoy borrowing things so i would buy vcr....i wanna take my time with these tapes, when you borrow you always have to getit back in certain time...

jvc? i've found somebody selling jvc s-vhs machines, like i said, but i don't need s-vhs, and it's too pricey...
and i dunno how well would it work; i wouldn't give such amount of money without testing it first, and it's not a nearby store...

Never say never: as a thumb rule, professional or prosumer gear is quite good or at least better than same time consumer stuff; I'd buy those made in early 2000s (1999-2002), when DVD still was a new thing, disc recorders costed "an arm and a leg" and VHS was still the king.
A better recorder can't read badly recorded tapes like pristine ones, but at least it'd have less dropouts, no or little tracking issues: you can extract all infos you can from tapes.

yeah, i would prefer such vintage too.
new things can be "too new", if you know what i mean...hehe...


lvr?
Longitudinal Video Recorder.
http://www.labguysworld.com/Cat_Toshiba.htm
http://www.labguysworld.com/Cat_BASF.htm

dunno why i mentioned not askinh google as it won't be that helpfull for such an obcsure format.

[i4004]

Re: Frako caps in Grundig VS620 vcr

grunding is a real find: drop-out compensator is good, and vsync is good!
now i don't wanna give it back to its owner!
hehe...

http://picasaweb.google.hr/i4004b3/GrundigGv501#

here's one on the ebay
http://cgi.ebay.de/VHS-Recorder-DEFE...d=p3286.c0.m14

would be good for spare parts...heh...