By the time my primary school bought a video recorder – some time in the late 1970s, if I recall correctly – I was already quite familiar with video recorders (I think we had a Betamax at the time, but I don’t remember correctly). I do remember, however, being fascinated by the fact that the tapes were square, rather than rectangular, meaning that the two spools were stacked one above the other, rather than being next to each other as VHS, Beta and Video 2000 tapes were.

Finding what the machine was took some research. My first thought was the search for “vintage VCR”, and the first thing I found that looked like the right thing was the Cartrivision system, the world’s first video recorder system with pre-recorded tapes available for rental or purchase – something that even the mighty Sony couldn’t manage with their U-matic system. (Their rental system is more or less what Lovefilm does now – they post to you, and you post back, except that you couldn’t rewind a pre-recorded Cartrivision tape without a special machine or damaging the tape – all plays were audited by the company).

But this didn’t feel right – Cartrivision was NTSC only (and we’re PAL here in the UK), and recorded only one field in three. For a television equipment obsessive, as I was, I’d have noticed the jerkiness: after all, I found the cinema flickery, and it wasn’t until I realised that they were showing 48 frames a second from a 24 frames a second film that I realised why. (My brains just wired that way)

Besides which, I seemed to remember that the recorder was manufactured by Grundig – a German company. So did they buy the rights to the Cartrivision technology when Cartrivision tanked in 1974, and simply adapt it to PAL? Interesting speculation, but it needed more investigation.

Turns out the Dutch electronics giant Philips were working on a system with similar looking tapes – the Philips VCR system. Like the Cartrivision, it had square tapes stacked one reel above the other, and had a recording time of around an hour on the longest tapes. Then, by chance, I saw the Grundig SVR4004, and knew immediately that was what I’d been looking for.

The Grundig SVR4004 was Grundig’s own spin on the Philips VCR format – and completely incompatible with it. Not only could recordings not be shared with the Philips machines, but even though they looked physically compatible, the tapes couldn’t be shared either because of differences in the tape coating. Although the Grundig could record three (or even four) hours compared to the Philips, the Grundig was seriously affected by the weather – recordings might play fine a week later, but a month later the machine’s alignment would have drifted enough to make the recordings unreliable, if not unwatchable.

The school only really used it to timeshift the educational programmes on TV for a few hours or perhaps a day or two – and to allow them to split the audience in two or three rather than having all 400 sprogs crowding in the same room at once.

They’re rare machines now, these Grundigs, mainly due to their low sales and unreliability. Their analogue tuner counts against them, although I suppose there may be one or two still in use somewhere, but for now I think I’ll stick to the DVD recorder, thanks. (Although it does make me wonder whether my old Betamax might be able to be revived…)

Tags: Betamax, Cartrivision, Grundig, Philips, school, Sony, tv, U-Matic, video

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 17:22 and is filed under Retro. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.