Help with cartravision

[cartravision]

I no longer have Orson Welles tape.

[jmdocs]

You'll probably have better luck finding someone with a working deck than resuscitating one yourself. First place I would start is this website:

http://www.angelfire.com/alt/cartrivision/

Check with the guy who put the site up; he appears to have one or access to one (You might not have found it if you were googling "Cartravision" rather than "Cartrivision.")

There are also commercial vendors who specialize in obsolete videotape playback and restoration; you'll spend some money but given the situation and the value of your material, it would probably be well spent. Best of luck with it.

[old_tv_nut]

Also search Cartrivision on this site for old threads on the subject - but none that would help repair one, I'm afraid -- good luck, and let us know how you progress.

[cartravision]

Abc

[Richard D]

I bought one from Olson electronics in the 1970's and was able to get it to work using a small B/W Sony TV monitor with video/audio out and used a modulator to send the COLOR signal to any color TV. The Sony monitor had a wide enough bandwidth to receive color. I highly recommened you get hold of someone who has a working one and will dub them for you, Even tapes recorded on the playback machine would have hooking problems at the top of the screen. You need someone familiar with the skip field system AVCO used.
Good Luck
Richard

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Richard D

I bought one from Olson electronics in the 1970's and was able to get it to work using a small B/W Sony TV monitor with video/audio out and used a modulator to send the COLOR signal to any color TV. The Sony monitor had a wide enough bandwidth to receive color. I highly recommened you get hold of someone who has a working one and will dub them for you, Even tapes recorded on the playback machine would have hooking problems at the top of the screen. You need someone familiar with the skip field system AVCO used.
Good Luck
Richard

I agree that finding a working one would be the best bet.

One note of encouragement: "Hooking" at the top of the picture due to horizontal sync mistiming was visible mainly due to the slow horizontal AFC in TV sets at the time (done for best off-air performance). Later TV sets (and VCR/DVD recorder dual decks) have been built with faster AFC to accomodate the horizontal mistiming that may occur with any home VTR. So, I expect you could get reasonable playback into a modern TV set or DVD recorder.

[cartravision]

Abc

[old_tv_nut]

Sorry, I don't know how the units were connected to the TV when they were built in. At Motorola, we evaluated stand-alone units, but Motorola eventually decided against marketing any Cartrivision either stand alone or built in.

[ChrisW6ATV]

You may be able to get audio and video directly out of the Cartrivision chassis to feed into a computer video-capture device.

[cartravision]

Abc

[cartravision]

Abc

[bgadow]

You have the market cornered! Great to hear that you were able to save all this; hope to hear good updates on the progress.

I should know this, but what make of TV is that?

[cartravision]

Abc

[jeyurkon]

Originally Posted by cartravision

...Something I noticed that I thought was strange, the back of the television has a 75 ohm coaxial cable tv input. I did not know cable television was available in 1972? I am only 32 years old and can remember as a kid having to buy adapters to hook cable tv to newer televisions than this through the vhf antenna input.

They started long before then. The first one was in 1948. There were 70 cable systems in 1952.

There were also other reasons for having a 73ohm input. See the attached image from a 1949 Sylvania manual.

John

[old_tv_nut]

Wow! You should definitely be able to get at least one working. If you determine it has baseband video and audio, that would be the way to go. If not, using the RF is a reasonable plan B.