1984-ish Hitachi 4 Head VCR
 

Looking to identify the first VCR my DAd bough back in '83 or '84. It was a front loading 4 head VCR, with a flip down door with controls behind it. The buttons for play, ffd and rvs were quite large as memory serves me.

Wondering if anyone here might know the model number or have photos. It was quite expensive at the time.

There's the VT-35A, but that was a 3-head model (though it does have big play buttons on it). There's also the VT-64A and VT-65A (same as the VT-64A but the door is black and it supports linear stereo).

Here's a list of Hitachi VCRs from the 1980s, might help in finding the exact model: http://vcr.wikidot.com/hitachi (years listed are "model years")

I unfortunately know nothing of these. With that being said I have to say that this Hitachi is one great looking machine.

Those 80's Hitachi units had very unique styling.

For sure! 80s VCRs in general were so varied and wild. I love how unique different brands looked, and how they were all trying wild innovations to develop the "next big feature".

VCRs in the 90s may have had less complexity and (arguably) more reliability, but they were so damned boring!

For sure! Dozens of buttons, huge VFDs, level meters on Hi-Fi units - anything to catch the attention of the consumer on the showroom floor. In the 80's they were all really trying to make the best deck they could but by the 90's it became a cost cutting race to the bottom for the cheapest thing they could get to market.

My grandparents had a Hitachi VCR when I was growing up, my uncle bought it for them back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and whenever me and my sister would go visit them we would watch Mary Poppins or other videos they had (the Mary Poppins tape they had was taped off the TV, so there was some neat period commercials on there, unfortunately that VCR and the TV they had at the time are long gone, they had a mid 1980s Sharp Linytron TV that for some reason the TV had developed a hum in the audio section (I think it may have been a 60hz hum like possibly a filter cap failed prematurely in the TV.)
So then they had gotten my great-grandparents old RCA ColorTrak 23" Console TV from the late 1970s that still worked like brand new yet (it had a red LED channel readout with a direct entry channel selector on the front panel (0-9 push-buttons on the front panel for channel selection, a knob for power and volume control, channel up and down buttons on the control panel and no remote control because it didn't come with one from the factory.)

It was similar to the VT-35A.

Did it look kind of like this attached picture of the VT-33A? If so it may have been either the VT-18A or VT-19A (both 4 head models from around 1983).

I haven't been able to find pictures of either model online, unfortunately.

EDIT: I think I was wrong about what the VT-18 and 19 looked like.

The buttons are too small.

What about these? VT-17E and VT-19E are European PAL versions, but I believe the VT-19E and VT-19A would have looked the same. VT-18A had same specs, but was not stereo.

VT-16A is a US NTSC version, but was only 2-head...same style buttons though.

I've never seen anything like those models in the US.

I haven't either. The only reason I suspect they exist is the service manual for the VT-16A which lists them all. Could just be that they weren't very popular, or had some achilles heel that caused them all to go in the landfill.

There are some VCRs from that era I had never seen or heard of that will suddenly pop up in a thrift store or on ebay.

The middle one is the closest.

Power supply was the problem with the Hitachi decks, three pass regulators on one bent aluminum heat sink wrapped around the board and they ran hot even in standby. Ours was the VT-??? HiFi from early 1985 that looked similar to the VT-33 and it survived 20+years of rental tapes and 3 teenagers fighting over the remote. They're well built otherwise and have a good reputation for tracking really bad tapes.