I remember in 2003 when the E-80 Panny came out and we were amazed that it would do a no loss high speed transfer from the HDD to a DVD-R. I believe vferrarri confirmed it.Nirvana. Also I remember making the outlandish statement that s-vhs was as good if not better than xp record on an E-80. Yeah it is good but not that good on video quality-Also do you remember when the cyberhome DVDR came out for 99 bucks in 2004 or so? There must have been 30,000 hits on that post. Also do you remember actually taking a pencil to rewind your VHS cartridge tape when it bulged out and otherwise jammed in the unit? Jeez.

So are you saying, given the current state of DVD Recorder offerings, that this has now become a nostalgia forum?

So are you saying, given the current state of DVD Recorder offerings, that this has now become a nostalgia forum?
Actually, no, we still have 2-8 years before our HDD units fail. and by then there will be new stuff.In fact most 2003 E-80's by panny are still going strong which proves that point. Eternally optimistic.

As a newbie, So did there used to be a VCR forum on AVS? I'm kinda surprised there is not even a DVHS forum on AVS. I've seen a few odd comments in the HD Recorders forum, but not much, and nothing for VCR users other than the occasional comments here in the DVD recorder forum.

hg -

I miss your DVD recorder test of the week. Seems like you got every new recorder within weeks of its release and compared its performance against your E80.

Vic

hg -

I miss your DVD recorder test of the week. Seems like you got every new recorder within weeks of its release and compared its performance against your E80.

VicOh God, I remember all that. And also his insistence that burned DVD-R's should only be played on a Secrets top player. But for me, the most memorable HG post will always be the Panasonic RAM torture tests conducted by his nieces and nephews with the help of some tree bark. I still laugh when I think about that one.

Those were the good old days, in the time before the Slinky-Squonk wars, when we had an expectation that each new model year would bring more features and refinement to some outstanding equipment. How the mighty have fallen . . .

...Also I remember making the outlandish statement that s-vhs was as good if not better than xp record on an E-80. Yeah it is good but not that good on video quality...

Yeah, I remember those days myself. Actually, it was the combination of an S-VHS VCR and Fuji videotape. You weren't the only one mentioning it. MikeUp agreed with you on that point.

As far as the Fuji videotape goes, I too preferred it over other brands. I discovered it back in the mid '80s. Fuji reds, at least back then, had a slightly unnatural luminescent intensity of which I preferred. Plus, a noticeably superior signal/noise ratio than other brands I had tried. I used those for my Beta VCRs until I discovered that I could use professional BetaCam tape in consumer BetaMax VCRs. Talk about a superior signal-to-noise ratio! But too bad a decent noise free analog cable signal was, for the most part, always elusive. Sometimes, you just can't win.


nx211

The finalization errors, the Pioneer blackouts, the scary Panny hard drive errors. Those were the good old days!

Like a breath of stale air. :cool:

The finalization errors, the Pioneer blackouts, the scary Panny hard drive errors. Those were the good old days!

And don't forget the dreaded "black level bug" on the pre-E80 Panny recorders and looking for a PC application that could read DVD-RAM VR mode discs, edit, add menus, and losslessly author to DVD-R (after suffering through failures such as DVDJr, SpruceUp, DVDit, the first such app to work consistently was Ulead's DVD Workshop - but it required you to change the extension on the vro file to mpg for it to work and it didn't like vr mode discs that had been edited or had multiple programs recorded. True VR>Video mode authoring Nirvana (I think this is what I was referring to when I first used the term Houston Guy) didn't exist until TMPG DVD Author (the venerable TDA) showed up on the scene in July 2003 - still have the original TDA authoring files on my computer to remind me when that milestone took place). That plus other venerable apps such as Panny's DVD Movie Album software (only came as OEM software packaged with their DVD-RAM drives), VirtualDub, Womble, Video Redo, Ulead DVD Movie Factory made life easier for us DVD recorder junkies adventurous enough to marry the ease of real time mpeg2 recording via the standalone recorder with PC DVD authoring (back in the day, mpeg encoding via even the most powerful PCs much much longer than the real time duration of the program you were encoding).

And don't forget the dreaded "black level bug" on the pre-E80 Panny recorders . . . And it appears to be back again with the Philips. Quite a few people reporting they notice dark pictures and have to turn up the brightness . . .

The really early days may not have been so great as the bugs were being worked out. But, at least they were being worked out. By the time of the E-85 we had some some really good units. When the era ended with the EH-55/75 and Pioneer 640, those were some damn fine units that are clearly superior to anything available today. How many of us lamented that all we wanted from Panasonic was an EH-55/75 with a digital tuner.

So did there used to be a VCR forum on AVS?
Does anybody know, or were VCR's basically dead before AVS started?

Does anybody know, or were VCR's basically dead before AVS started?

I don't know when AVS started, but I believe there was never a VCR section to this web site. However, I only started visiting this site about the summer of 2003 so I could be wrong on this. Perhaps an older member can chime in on this point.

It was in the July-August time frame of 2003 that the DVD Recorder section of this site opened up. I had just found this site not long before that and can remember this being a new section.

In August of 2003, I was still recording with Beta tape, but I was looking to get into the new world of DVD recording. About a year earlier, Sony announced the end of the consumer Beta production line and I thought that they might be working on there first DVD recorder. When it did finally become available for sale, Sony was somewhat late to the party. Pioneer and Panasonic recorders were available well before Sony came out with there first consumer model and they already had HDD models while Sony's first recorder was HDD-less. And I can remember that first Sony HDD-less model being the butt of a few jokes from HG from time to time, btw. :eek:

Although I had been making recordings with Beta machines since the early-to-mid 80's, with respect to DVD recorders, I was pretty much on the outside looking in. However, some of the members posting in this section were already pretty advanced with making DVD recordings at that time and were very helpful to us newbies - vferrari and HG being being a couple of examples of those earlier helpful members.

However, I thought that MikeUp did the best reviews of those early DVD recorder models. He brought them all back shortly after purchasing them - concluding that they were pretty much a work-in-progress. And, he went through quite a few models from what I can remember. I followed his posts somewhat closely, because I knew that everything that he was seeing and complaining about would have ticked me off too, and I would have returned all of those recorders myself had I purchased them - for those same reasons. In fact, I still find it hard to believe to this day that the majority of people put up with VHS in those early years of VCRs, when there was still a choice between VHS and Beta. But that is pretty much a moot point in the days of DVRs and TIVO. VCRs are long dead IMO, at least for making new recordings with.


nx211

Bump, for the memories...

I never did figure out decent settings for S-VHS to E80H transfer. My feeble attempts yielded over contrasted, washed out PQ.

BC