U-Matic anyone? (working machines/personal expericences)
 

Does any one owns working U-Matic machines or had any personal expericene with the format?
That problem with red colour was specific to N.T.S.C. machines or it was to all machines?

I got an army of them here .Its been a few years since I used them.I got a portable Sony with camera I picked up from a church years ago and it works great.Try to walk around town to a event with that setup these days.People think I was sent from a time warp machine from the early 1980's.

Red problem ? I have owned several u-matic machines over the years and still have a portable (VO 6800) with dead battery packs around somewhere. I don’t remember seeing a problem with the red on these machines, could you explain what the symptoms were?

jr

I've got a mostly working ( tuner is dead, and I've not tried to record, but it plays good) Sony VO-1600 (the first U-matic model).

I have a JVC CP-5200U (playback only) that I need to get new rubber for and finally get it going. I'm curious about what's on the tape I got with it. Fortunately I found out the dimensions of an idler tire that melted down completely. The other tire, pinch roller and most of the belts need to be measured.

Read about this on wikipedia and some one mentioned that it seen it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGNXwZooiPc

Interesting... from Wikipeda:
"The format also had difficulty reproducing the colour red, and red images would be noisier than other colours in the spectrum. For this reason, on-camera talent was discouraged from wearing red clothing that would call attention to the technical shortcoming."

I see loss of resolution on the over saturated red flower near the end of the clip, not sure if it is noise. The "red wall" special effect looks odd, but who knows what effect they were trying to produce. :scratch2:
I thought the model's lipstick looked quite good.

Note, this is a Sony UK production, so likely it was not NTSC.
Wrinkled tape was a fairly common problem, however.

jr

I have a BVU-800, still working so far. The main problem with U-matic is, well, that it's U-matic. The video improvements in the upgraded offerings in the later years came from bypassing original circuitry, according to one repair tech I know. Less crap in the signal chain resulted in better picture. Who knew?

Chip

Holly smoke, what a complex machine! :yikes: And I thought a V.H.S. V.C.R. was a complex machine.
It's a low band or high band machine?

When moving these boat anchors around make sure you wear safety shoes and a lifting belt. Maybe thats the reason my back is shot lifting these machines along with TV sets plus warehouse work all of these years.

see:
http://www.av-iq.com/avcat/images/do...20-%204611.pdf

All these formats used "color-under." The chroma signal was simply translated to a low frequency, and the FM modulated luma signal acted as the high-frequency bias for the QAM chroma signal.

The terms low band and high band do not really apply in the same way as for 2 inch and 1 inch formats, which recorded the color on the FM carrier as part of the composite signal, although Sony applied those terms when it raised the FM frequency in U-Matic SP.

Regarding red problems, there was really a problem with all saturated colors in all color-under systems, it was just more visible in red, especially in NTSC countries where TV sets were being built with increased R-Y gain to compensate for the contemporary yellowish green phosphors. PAL did the compensation in the cameras, so that excessive gain was not needed in receivers.

The different color-under systems differed somewhat in the noise and beat patterns that could occur in chroma due to the particular carrier frequencies chosen. All of them suffered from low chroma bandwidth compared to direct broadcast or tape formats that recorded the full composite signal on the FM carrier. The resulting chroma smear was most visible in reds, as you can see in the demo tape.

Another factor is that color-under systems used automatic video gain control on the luma and chroma to try to maximize the signal to noise ratio on low contrast and/or low chroma scenes, without overloading on high contrast and/or high chroma scenes. The noise level at the output could vary depending on what AGC characteristics were in the recording machine, and how much of the scene had high chroma levels.

EDIT: The playback circuit had to detect the video level coming off the tape and compensate it back to normal. The automatic RECORDING gain control was taken advantage of by CopyGuard, which put video pulses in the vertical blanking that varied from zero (black) to super-white, thus causing the record circuits to turn the video gain down and making the picture fade out periodically when you tried to make a copy. (The machine playing back the original CopyGuard protected tape ignored the vertical pulses.)

Oh my goodness, I severely underestimated the weight of my JVC. I thought "Hey, it must be about the weight of an old top-loading VHS, right?" I went almost as far as the bus system would reach to get the thing, and had to carry it down quite a long path back to the main road before I could even get a bus. Of course I had to set it down many times. Then I had to carry it uphill from the transfer point to get my next bus, and the nearest stop was closed due to construction. It must have taken me about 20 minutes to get from where one route ended and the other began. Then I had to stop at the grocery store on my way home so I carried the thing a couple hundred yards over there and plopped it on top of a small shopping cart. I went to a nearby store as well with said cart, leaving it outside for a couple of minutes. These carts have an automatic locking mechanism on one wheel to prevent theft; they're triggered by cables buried under the asphalt. No trouble on my way to the other store. On my way back to the grocery store, the lock was triggered and the cart tipped forward, almost falling over. One of the cart wranglers released it with what I'll call a magic wand. Once I finished up there I carried the deck back to the bus stop and finally home. Re-gaining full use of my arms took a couple of days. Whenever I moved the thing after that I wondered how the heck I mustered the strength to get it home. I emailed the guy who gave it to me about my adventure and he said "Yeah I warned you about how juicy that one was". Had I known I would have taken my relatively small convertible trolley.

As for the U-Matic's flaws, or those of color-under systems in general, now it makes sense why U-Matic was so widely used in broadcasting. Early on I heard it is superior in many ways to VHS and Beta, not to mention the lesser-known consumer decks.

I have what I consider the ultimate Umatic deck...the end-of-the-line Sony BVU-950SP. I got it a few years ago out of an Ohio tv station. Well maintained and with the optional TBC board. It worked out of the box but got cranky a year ago. I sent it to a local Umatic expert who replaced a few tires and gave it a cleaning and a RF and signal path setup. PM me if you want his info. Joe advises that most of the decks he sees lately have massive cap failures eating the traces. None in my deck. He is the best. Its back to its 330 line glory and I am going through my Umatic tapes to digital.

I took some pix tonight from a Panasonic 9" monitor. The shots are from various tapes at my station in the 70's and most suffer from multi-generation copies. All of the on-camera shots are from a RCA TK-43 to 2" and then Umatic so they are a mess to start with. The bars are new bars on a new tape. Some fringing but not much. Reds have minimal noise. All pix have some camera moire and some camera sync errors. They are better in person so stop by. The worst problem of the day was ringing trailing most any sharp edged object on the early to mid decks. And that piled up with each copy. The 950 is quite good at not having the ringing problem.

And Wayne, I remember looking at Copyguard on a scope and saw that when the AGC saw the super white it corrected the video level to 100 IRE but also collapsed the sync to 20 units or so rendering the signal unusable by the next VCR. Sync was to low for a good recording thus garbage. I also remember that Betamax decks inserted new sync so that problem was solved. Buy Betamax for copying.

Maybe I should post a classified for Umatic copying at a good price. Let me know.

Jon...more on the use of Umatic in the day on air. Stations ran to it like dogs to a steak. Cheaper than color 16mm film. The problem was on air with a deck that was just above VHS quality running through a TBC of the day. The H scan timing was suspect at best and you would broadcast news stories with black timing stripe errors on either the left or right or both depending on the manufacturer. JVC was junk for air. That resulted in a FCC pink ticket fining you for broadcasting "non program" material. A little black gap was not part of the program.