When was vcr invented

JVC's print advertising campaign focused on the four separate tape heads that would keep the picture "crisp and free of snow during the stop-action and slow-motion. It promised greater noise reduction and improved sharpness in picture quality.

Two years later, Super VHS made its debut. By then Betamax had started to fade. Ultimately, VHS won the battle, and tech lore has it that the porn industry played a big role in that victory. Hollywood studios stopped offering movies on VHS. The VCR, though, refused to die quickly. Two-thirds of American households will have to make an impossible choice: David Hasselhoff or Angela Lansbury?

The remaining third , though, will be kicking back and watching both. By programming their dual-tuner video cassette recorder , or VCR, a miracle of magnetic tape that transformed how we watch television and movies forever.

But when they first came on the scene, not everyone was a fan. Rogers, Tom Cruise, and E. The advent of television in the American home in the late s and its dramatic adoption throughout the s offered a whole new entertainment portal for Americans, who had grown accustomed to radio as the medium of choice in their homes.

Now they could watch comedies like I Love Lucy , Westerns like Gunsmoke , and riveting dog-driven dramas like Lassie —presuming they were in front of their sets when the shows came on.

Electronics manufacturers knew consumers wanted a way to free themselves from appointment television. In the s, companies like RCA were trying to crack the code of practical video storage.

The thinking was, if you could record audio on magnetic tape, why not video? But video footage requires much more data than audio, and therefore needs to move much more quickly around the tape heads in the machine.

A company named Ampex figured out that instead of moving the tape around the heads at ridiculous speeds, the heads themselves should spin. With that breakthrough, Ampex introduced the Mark IV in But … there was a problem: The device was the size of a desk. Not exactly an affordable holiday gift. Ampex only sold a couple hundred of the machines to broadcasters who wanted to record their programs and had the budget to invest in the equipment.

One of the first practical television recording solutions for households was the Cartrivision , which debuted in The Cartrivision used 8-inch plastic cartridges that were inserted into a compartment on a television console to record shows.

You could also rent feature films like Dr. You needed two hands to program a recording, with one pressing a button while the other twirled a knob. When you did manage to perfect your ambidexterity and get it working, the picture quality was still poor due to a data-conserving recording process. On a sales floor, it looked like any other television, except it cost three times as much.

By , Cartrivision was done. That was probably for the best, because what was coming next was something the modest Cartrivision would never have been able to compete with: two massive Japanese companies spending millions of dollars to outdo each other in a bid to conquer the lucrative world of allowing people to watch movies in their underwear. It started peacefully.

Both Sony and JVC recognized that television viewers wanted to engage in time-shifting, which allowed them to watch what they wanted when they wanted. In fact, the companies, with a little help from Ampex, collaborated to launch a machine called the U-matic in The U-matic was developed by Sony in concert with JVC and Matsushita now known as Panasonic in the hopes it could become a universal standard. Since no one you know has ever owned a U-matic, you can probably guess there were problems.

First, it weighed Second, there was the cost. Because most people opted to buy, say, a lightly-used mid-size car instead, the U-matic went the way of the Ampex machine and was used mainly for commercial purposes. Sony and JVC knew they were on to something, but the machines needed to be much smaller, and so did the cassette tapes. Both companies agreed a home video recorder should use magnetic tape about a half-inch in width.

But Sony founder Masaru Ibuka was more concerned about the size of the cassette itself. He told his engineers that blank tapes should be about the size of a paperback book. Their designers, including Yuma Shirashi, who was general manager of the Research and Development Division, thought the most important feature was recording time—at least two hours. That would be enough for a couple of television dramas, a movie, or at least a significant chunk of a sporting event.

If a cassette had to be a little bigger and the picture quality slightly inferior, well, that was a fair trade-off. He wanted a worldwide standard. He knew it would take years for people to adopt the new technology, even comparing it to the steady growth of a bonsai tree. Both, he said, require years of unwavering commitment before bearing fruit. Granted, they initially made the same mistake Ampex did, insisting their recorder be sold as part of an entire television console, the LV Normal people called this recording.

In just three months at the end of , Sony sold a respectable 15, units. They were also happy to license their technology to other companies, like RCA. RCA recognized that sports fans would want to be able to record games running three hours or more. They told Sony that an option to slow down the recording speed to get more out of a videotape would be appealing to consumers.

Sony ignored the suggestion, but JVC listened. They just wanted to see the whole game. In truth, the difference in quality was minor, and on most televisions, it would be hard to tell a difference.

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