Philips N1500

Philips VCR – the first home video cassette recorder

Graphics for Philips VCR in black, white and green with striking Op-Art feel

Graphic design for Philips VC-45 and VC-30 VCR tape boxes in the Greatbear collection

For thegreatbear.co.uk, I get to photograph and document racks and racks of beautiful 'obsolete' tape machines in the Greatbear studio. From time to time pictures of our machines pop up elsewhere online (I'm convinced our machines are the best-looking on the internet), and this month one of our Philips N1500 VCRs is featured in Australian electronics magazine Silicon Chip (May 2021).

The siliconchip.com.au article describes Philips' development of VCR: the first cassette-based video tape recording system designed for domestic use, following the success of their revolutionary Compact Cassette audio tapes, recorders and players (1962 onwards). This is set in the context of U-matic, the Panasonic Video Cartridge, Betamax and VHS.

The article is part 3 of a well-researched and illustrated feature series on The History of Video Tape. Scroll down for a text extract from the article - we recommend subscribing to the whole series.

Philips N1500 VCR with elevator open and loaded with VC45 cassette. Note buttons for tuning to ITV, BBC1 and BBC2 labelled with red Dymo tape.

"Philips [had] entered the domestic open-reel market with half-inch VTRs beginning with their 1969 release of the desktop LDL-1000. Although easy to use, it lacked a tuner, forcing users to have existing TV receivers modified to supply video and audio signals for the VTR. Such modified sets were known as receiver monitors.

The LDL-1000 achieved some success, but recalling the success of their audio Compact Cassette system (siliconchip.com.au July 2018), Philips began development of a cassette system for video recording.

Their N1500, released in 1972 (just one year after Sony’s U-matic), offered an integrated design. Containing a tuner and a timer and able to supply a standard television signal output, the N1500 hit the spot with consumers, except for the problem of tape length. The N1500 can claim to be the world’s first domestic VCR (video cassette recorder).

Philips’ VCR system mechanism, like their compact cassette mechanism, was offered royalty-free to manufacturers who agreed to maintain the design standard and use the VCR logo. You can see a video of a VCR tape loading at https://youtu.be/9-Bw8m65mVY

The VCR cassette stacked the supply and [take-up]reels above each other in a coaxial design. At only 125 x 145 x 40mm, it was much more compact than the standard U-matic cassette.

Its width (under 60% that of U-matic) helped moderate the size of the entire tape drive mechanism. While this elegant solution offered a genuinely compact medium, the complexity of its threading mechanism meant that its reliability was only fair.

Using a half-inch tape with a conventional 180° degree omega wrap, the Philips VCR was able to offer 60-minute record/play times at the CCIR/PAL speed of 14.29cm/s (5.63ips).

Philips attempted to market to the United States in mid-1977, but NTSC’s higher field rate (60Hz vs CCIR/PAL’s 50Hz) forced an increase in tape speed to around 17.2cm/s (6.8ips), giving only 50 minutes for a cassette. A thinner tape, offering the full 60 minutes for NTSC, proved unreliable in use.

Other compromises finally made their VCR unsuitable for the American and other NTSC markets, while the introduction of VHS in 1977 convinced Philips to abandon the US market. As a result, their VCR was only marketed to the UK, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Philips tape loading is simpler than that of the U-matic. Sony had put every interaction (transport, heads and guides) in the external tape path. Philips cleverly used two cassette doors: an upwards-hinging one at the front for tape extraction, and a sliding one at the right, allowing the audio/control track head and the pinch roller to intrude into the cassette.

Video entry and exit guides, and the capstan, also intruded vertically into the cassette as it was loaded downwards, giving much a more compact tape transport than that of U-matic. The pinch roller and audio/control heads, mounted on a pivoted arm, were swung into place for playback and recording.

Where the U-matic head drum was designed with slip-ring contacts from the heads to the VCR electronics, Philips used a rotary transformer design that had already been used in Ampex 1-inch open-reel VTRs. Although more difficult to design and manufacture, the rotary transformer overcame noise and signal loss caused by slip-ring corrosion or misalignment. It would become the design of choice in Beta, VHS and following formats.

The N1500 was developed as far as the N1520 production model. Dispensing with the inbuilt tuner, the N1520 offered record/playback and full electronic assembly/insert video and audio editing. Released in 1973, it beat Sony’s VO-2850 workalike U-matic editor to market by a full year.

Regrettably, the Philips VCR format suffered from unreliable tape loading/handling, and that dreaded one-hour time limit.

Philips did develop a long-play VCR, the N1700 series, by halving the tape speed. Not released until 1977, when the Sony-JVC/Beta-VHS melee was well underway, the Philips VCR lapsed into obscurity. "

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Extract from The History of Videotape – part 3 Cassette Systems by Ian Batty, Andre Switzer & Rod Humphris, Silicon Chip, May 2021

Preview of page from www.siliconchip.com.au The History of Video Tape - Part 3: Cassette Systems

Philips N1500 VC30 video cassette with shell open to show tape between coaxial spools

Philips N1500 cassette dimensions: 12.7 x 14.5 x 3.8 cm

Posted by melanie in video tape, video technology, machines, equipment, 0 comments

Philips N-1502 TV Recorder

The front page of the Philips N-1502 TV Recorder catalogue presents a man peering mournfully into a dark living room. A woman, most probably his wife, drags him reluctantly out for the evening. She wants to be social, distracted in human company.

The N-1502 tape machine is superimposed on this unfamiliar scene, an image of a Grand Slam tennis match arises from it, like a speech bubble, communicating the machine’s power to capture the fleeting live event. The man’s stare into the domestic environment constructs desire in a way that feels entirely new in 1976: a masculinity that appropriates the private space of the home, now transformed as a location where media events are transmitted and videotaped.

The man’s gaze is confrontational. It invites those looking to participate in a seductive, shared message: videotape-in the home-will change your life forever.

In the 1970s Philips were leading figures in the development of domestic video tape technology. Between 1972 and 1979, the company produced seven models of the N-1500 video ‘TV recorder’. It was the first time video tape entered the domestic environment, and the format offered a number of innovations such as timed, unattended recording (‘busy people needn’t miss important programmes’), an easy loading mechanism, a built in TV tuner, a digital electronic time switch and stop motion bar.

The N-1500 converged upon several emergent markets for video tape. While SONY’s hulking U-matic format almost exclusively targeted institutional and industrial markets, the N-1500 presented itself as a more nimble alternative: ‘Compact and beautifully designed it can be used in schools, advertising agencies, sale demonstrations and just about everywhere else.’

Used alongside the Philips Video Camera, the N-1500 could capture black and white video, offering ‘a flexible, economic and reliable’ alternative to EIAJ/ porta-pak open reel video. Marketing also imagined uses for sports professionals: practices or competitive games could be watched in order to analyse and improve performance.

Although N-1500 tape machines were very expensive (£649 [1976]/ £4,868.38 [2016]), the primary market for the product was overwhelmingly domestic. In 2016 we are fairly used to media technologies disrupting our intimate, every day lives. We are also told regularly that this or that gadget will make our lives easier.

Such needs are often deliberately and imaginatively invented. The mid-1970s was a time when video tape was novel, and its social applications experimental. How could video tape be used in the home? How would it fit into existing social relationships? The marketing brochure for the Philips N-1502 offer compelling evidence of how video tape technology was presented to consumers in its early days.

One aspect highlighted how the machine gave the individual greater control of their media environment: ‘Escape from the Dictatorship of TV Timetables’!

The VCR could also help liberate busy people from the disappointment of missing their favourite TV programmes, ‘if visitors call at the moment of truth don’t despair. Turn the TV off and the VCR on.’

In the mid 1970s domestic media consumption was inescapably communal, and the N-1500 machine could help sooth ‘typical’ rifts within the home. ‘You want to see a sports programme but your wife’s favourite serial is on the other channel. The solution? Simple. Just switch on your Philips VCR.’

Owning the N-1500 meant there would be ‘no more arguments about which channel to select – you watch one while VCR makes a parallel recording from another.’ Such an admission tells us a lot about the fragility of marriages in the 1970s, as well as the central place TV-watching occupied as a family activity. More than anything, the brochure presents videotape technology as a vital tool that could help people take control over their leisure time and negotiate the competing tastes of family members.

N-1500 transfers

As the first domestic video tape technology, the Philips N-1500 ‘set a price structure and design standard that is still unshaken,’ wrote the New Scientist in 1983.

In a preservation context, however, these early machines are notoriously difficult to work with. Tapes heads are fragile and wear quickly because of a comparatively high running tape speed (11.26 ips). Interchange is often poor between machines, and the entry/ exit guides on the tape path often need to be adjusted to ensure the tapes track correctly.

Later models, the N-1700 onwards, used slant azimuth technology, a recording technique patented by Professor Shiro Okamura of the University of Electronic Communications, Tokyo in 1959. Slant azimuth was adopted by JVC, Philips and SONY in the mid-1970s, and this decision is heralded as a breakthrough moment in the evolution of domestic video tape technology. The technique offered several improvements to the initial N-1500 model, which used guard bands to prevent cross talk between tracks, and the Quadruplex technology developed by Ampex in the late 1950s. Slant azimuth meant more information could be recorded onto the tape without interference from adjacent tracks and, crucially, the tape could run at a slower speed, use less tape and record for longer.

In general, the design of the N-1500’s tape path and transport doesn’t lend itself to reliability.

As S P Bali explains:

‘One reason for the eventual failure of the Philips VCR formats was that the cassette used coaxial spools—in other words, spools stacked one on top of the other. This means that the tape had to run a skew path which made it much more difficult to control. The tape would jam, and even break, especially ageing cassettes.’ [1]

Philips N1500 (top) & Philips N1702 (bottom) machines in the Greatbear studio

Such factors make the Philips N-1500 series an especially vulnerable video tape format. The carrier itself is prone to mechanical instability, and preservation worries are heightened by a lack of available spare parts that can be used to refurbish poorly functioning machines.

If you have valuable material recorded on this format, be sure to earmark it as a preservation priority.

Notes

[1] S P Bali (2005) Consumer Electronics, Delhi: Pearson Education, 465.

Posted by debra in video tape, video technology, machines, equipment, 0 comments