TV Assholes **LANGUAGE/RANTY**

[Ironclad Alibi]

Ah, the days of vertical control and fine tuning. Remember how the picture would flip, over and over and over? I imagine some of you don't even know what I'm talking about

I know very well. In addition to the vertical control to stop picture rolling, there was the horizontal control to stop jagged pictures. For extra fun, we had rabbit ears with tin foil* flags that we had to aim just right so it would get the TV signal bounced off the water tower across the road.

My family got their first B&W TV in 1957, when I was 9. I got my first color TV after I graduated college and built a Heathkit color TV kit. I miss Heathkit. I had a lot of their kits over the years.

*It's called aluminum foil these days.

[sms001]

The funnest part of this nostalgia trip for me is memories of going to the Ace Hardware store with my step-dad to replace a tube. There was a huge console on an end-cap where you could plug in the old tube to ensure it was bad, and then underneath were the replacement tubes; soon the TV would be OK again! BTW, lucky boy here, the big three, a local, a PBS, AND two UHFs. SEVEN whole channels. But you didn't know how good that was, there was no internet to make you aware of other's situation....

[Racket_Man]

My parents has one that was about the size of a jukebox and used a big replaceable quartz marble. I was still working in the 80's, which was the last time it was turned on, to my knowledge.

yup that was size. they kept it into the late 70's if I remember correctly until they bought one of the console type combo cabinet ones (AM/FM stereo, record player and I think an 8-track player)

[wolfie]

a very tiny nitpick from my ooooold A/V class: a VHS unit is a VCR (video cassette recorder); a Betamax is a type of VTR (video tape recorder). I no longer recall what the specific differences are, aside from how broad the tape inside of the media itself is (Beta = broader); tho I do recall that Beta tapes were of much higher visual and audio quality, able to hold more data per tape, lasted longer before degrading, and were still in common use in newsrooms as recently as the late 90's, before everything went all-digital. Unfortunately, the media was also a bit more expensive than VHS cassettes, and people voted with their wallets : Price won out over quality in the end.

Beta and VHS both used 1/2" tape. My understanding is that Beta's flaw (from a consumer viewpoint) was that it could only get 1 hour on a tape (normal-speed recording) while VHS could get 2, so a VHS tape could hold a feature-length movie but Beta couldn't (I remember seeing an ad, can't remember which machine it was for, that featured an automatic tape changer for extended time). The 2 hours for VHS in normal-speed is why the standard "6 hour" (in super-extended mode) tape has a 120 in the part number - 120 minutes.

Also, I believe that the commercial units (at least toward the end) used digital Beta - still used Beta tapes, but the data was stored in digital format. My guess is that was for backward compatibility with storage racks.

[EricKei]

I distinctly recall watching full-length (2 hour-ish) movies on Beta on just one tape (ex. "The Andromeda Strain" back in HS). Perhaps blanks intended for home use were shorter?

I wish I had known back then just how shitty 6-hour recordings came out, or for how little relative time they lasted before visibly degrading x.x These days I'm a lot more picky, tho I'm hardly a fanatic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war - includes *some* info regarding playback time

[Mytical]

It was 1985 before our family had a TV, but mostly because of financial concerns not because I am older then dirt or anything. We mostly listened to radio or read until then.

[wolfie]

I distinctly recall watching full-length (2 hour-ish) movies on Beta on just one tape (ex. "The Andromeda Strain" back in HS). Perhaps blanks intended for home use were shorter?

The 1 hour for Beta was in standard-speed mode (like the 2 hours on a T-120 VHS tape). The movie was probably recorded in an extended-play mode, which would (if they'd done the same slowdowns as VHS did) have given a 3 hour recording time (the "6 hour" VHS recording on a T-120 tape).