Who was the market for the JVC CR-6x00U?
 

Someone's waving a CR-6300U at me for not too much money but I'm a little confused on who on earth JVC was selling this to.
I already own a Sony VO-2600 but that is clearly a studio machine since it's your standard functionality Umatic top-loader with record functionality and not a lot else. This JVC unit however has a UHF/VHF tuner and a clock, presumably for at least a single-event timed recording mode. Two things in a studio environment you would of never need.
In 1976 JVC had also just started marketing VHS the same year with the same features. (okay it has a digital clock rather than analog) The CR-6300 new seems to of been around $1900, while the HR-3300 VHS deck was supposedly around $1200 (I can't find a reliable source on the price). Was shipping a consumer-grade Umatic deck a stopgap for VHS or were they aiming at upper-class households and educational institutions such as schools where the content being recorded wasn't always going to be a composite camera feed?

Hi to all,
Hi MIPS,

When Sony invented the U-Matic format at the extreme end of the 60s, it was hoping to make it a consumer format (see YT Sony History movie).
JVC & Panasonic also adopted the standard.
Didn't happen; too expensive, too bulky and tapes limited to 60 min, too short for a movie. Some use for X-rated content.
Then portable machines appeared and Electronic News Gathering (ENG) was born, replacing 16mm cameras.
Later BVU-class studio Broadcast machines with TBCs became available and the format became truely Broadcast.
By now (1976) cheaper VHS & Betamax catered to the consumer market.

This is why your JVC has a tuner & clock: hopefully to seduce for home use or educational (record school videos broadcast at odd hours).

Sony History, 14min, U-Matic near the end :
https://youtu.be/vaskou2gl44?si=9-O1k4UAo8xyqM-o

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France

Pretty much these sold to high end consumers and educational institutions. My first year Sony VO-1600 Umatic has built in TV tuners and an accessory timer unit was made for it (the first 2-3 standalone Betamax decks were the same way: Internal tuners, external accessory timers), and these clearly were meant for consumer applications. My 1600 came from a college in Illinois with the tapes it made and had a mixture of time shifts from television and recorded events in lecture halls.

A few years ago I went to an estate sale on one of the last days and picked up a few pron flicks on Umatic. They apparently were being rented out by a local establishment that they weren't returned to.... That same sale yielded a 50s RCA TV, a bunch of EIAJ, PL-259 and BNC cables, and a Bell and Howell audio cassette changer. The folks clearly had a good bit of high end early VTRs and audio gear, and I wonder what I missed out on earlier in the sale...