Early 1980s RCA SelectaVision VHS Player

[waltchan]

Originally Posted by Findm-Keepm

Hope this helps - those VCRs were the best of the era.

I disagree, and I'm tired of techs telling me repeatedly Hitachi VCRs were the most-reliable. They're not at all. They liked them only because they made a lot of money from them on service, while customers were never pleased seeing that. They wished they bought a different brand. That's not what reliability means. People could have avoided going through this belt-change procedure and goo-cleaning mess if Hitachi designed a chassis using fewer belts in the first place, along with standard direct-drive capstan motor. Instead, they cut costs in production using multiple pulley motors with more belts in it, along with some of the stupidest Japanese engineers I've seen working for Hitachi. They finally caught that belt problems too late in 1987, and immediately changed the chassis to one-belt starting in 1988, but it still had multiple common problems. Hitachi didn't actually build a really reliable VCR until after 1993 or so until 2000 with the Hi-Fi models, while all the mono models were made by Funai.