1984-ish Hitachi 4 Head VCR

[probnot]

Originally Posted by dishdude

Those 80's Hitachi units had very unique styling.

For sure! 80s VCRs in general were so varied and wild. I love how unique different brands looked, and how they were all trying wild innovations to develop the "next big feature".

VCRs in the 90s may have had less complexity and (arguably) more reliability, but they were so damned boring!

[dishdude]

Originally Posted by probnot

For sure! 80s VCRs in general were so varied and wild. I love how unique different brands looked, and how they were all trying wild innovations to develop the "next big feature".

VCRs in the 90s may have had less complexity and (arguably) more reliability, but they were so damned boring!

For sure! Dozens of buttons, huge VFDs, level meters on Hi-Fi units - anything to catch the attention of the consumer on the showroom floor. In the 80's they were all really trying to make the best deck they could but by the 90's it became a cost cutting race to the bottom for the cheapest thing they could get to market.

[vortalexfan]

My grandparents had a Hitachi VCR when I was growing up, my uncle bought it for them back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and whenever me and my sister would go visit them we would watch Mary Poppins or other videos they had (the Mary Poppins tape they had was taped off the TV, so there was some neat period commercials on there, unfortunately that VCR and the TV they had at the time are long gone, they had a mid 1980s Sharp Linytron TV that for some reason the TV had developed a hum in the audio section (I think it may have been a 60hz hum like possibly a filter cap failed prematurely in the TV.)
So then they had gotten my great-grandparents old RCA ColorTrak 23" Console TV from the late 1970s that still worked like brand new yet (it had a red LED channel readout with a direct entry channel selector on the front panel (0-9 push-buttons on the front panel for channel selection, a knob for power and volume control, channel up and down buttons on the control panel and no remote control because it didn't come with one from the factory.)