Panasonic NV-H100 VCR - anything special?

[n8nagel]

Good afternoon everyone,

I recently moved and there's a lot of "stuff" in my new place left behind by previous tenants, I'm also going through my own collection and getting rid of things that just aren't worth fixing. Today I loaded my car up with a broken Sony CD player (I probably could fix it, but it's just not worth it), a broken UHD player (not a great one), a box full of remotes for which I don't have the equipment (I was able to pair one TV with one remote so the downstairs bedroom now has a TV, but I kept finding remotes on random bookshelves, in drawers, etc.) AND a Panasonic NV-H100 VCR.

I don't even know if the VCR works, but honestly I didn't really care, as the reason I subscribed to these forums in the first place was that I'd found a NEC DS8000U in a Goodwill that I randomly stopped at (on the way from dropping off some audio gear to be fixed, no I don't have a problem) which ended up working fine after replacing the main belt (and of course spending several times what I'd paid for the unit for the manual and remote.) The NEC is of course a S-VHS unit and therefore I really felt no need to keep an ordinary looking VCR around. UNTIL...

I'd already dropped the two busted pieces off at Best Buy for recycling, and was on my way to Goodwill to drop off the VCR and box of remotes when I looked down and realized that while the writing on the front panel looked normal, everything on the back panel was either Chinese or Japanese and it was also marked 100V 50/60Hz. So, I'm guessing it was originally for the Japanese market. This is plausible, as my landlady is ethnically Chinese and so are most of her friends, but also lived several years in Japan before coming to the US. So, I aborted my Goodwill trip and went back to work, because I didn't want to get rid of something potentially desirable.

A little google shows that China uses SECAM but Japan uses essentially a slightly modified form of NTSC. So if it's Chinese, I wouldn't want to donate it because a) it wouldn't be of any interest to anyone without SECAM tapes and b) it's a format I don't own, and my landlady might have tapes she wants to play on it.

Does anyone know for sure if this is Chinese or Japanese? Does anywhere in China use 100V power? this unit presumably was working fine on 120V however (really more like 125-128 in my area)

I guess I could fire it up and see if I get a display but a) I'd have to set up my TV first which I haven't done yet and b) clean the head and finally c) find the few VHS tapes I own in the wreck of my living room so I figured I'd ask here, since I can't seem to find a manual, only eBay listings.

Now here's the funny thing, this is the second piece I've come across like this very recently. Just last Saturday I saw on Trash Nothing a gentleman was giving away a "radio tuner and CD player". The CD player is the 5 disc Sony that I just recycled, but the tuner turned out to be a Technics component tuner, model ST-Z11S, which doesn't appear to have been ever sold in the US (the guy told me he was from India and I assume that that's where it was purchased) and *includes shortwave*. I couldn't get there fast enough because I really just like stuff like this. I can find manuals for the ST-Z11, a little info on the ST-Z11L (which includes longwave, I guess for Europe?) but no info at all on ST-Z11S. It works great on AM and FM but guess what band I can't get any reception on... it's still a cool piece though.