[Dave A]

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.