Fisher FVH-520 VCR

[vortalexfan]

Originally Posted by probnot

My first VCR as a kid was a (Panasonic-made) RCA VGT-200 which had the exact problem you described - black and white playback only. Which was how 10 year old me could afford it, but that was ok because my bedroom TV was also black and white. Very unusual, this VCR only had forward visual search, no visual rewind search. I wonder if yours was the Panasonic branded version of my RCA and it was maybe a common issue.

When I upgraded to a colour TV I found out that wiggling the tracking control back and forth would cause the colour to "pop" in. Of course, this had no effect on recording which was stuck as black and white still.

I bet the problem would have been a fairly simple fix with what I know now, such as a capacitor in the chroma circuit, or even just a slight adjustment. Oh well.

You live and learn as they say, I'm guessing it was probably something like that on the ones I had that had the video failure issues as well.

But at that time in my life (I was about 16 or so at the time) I was still just learning how to diagnose and repair some of the basics at the time, such as recapping and replacing tubes in old radios and replacing cords on those radios as well and rewiring old lamps and diagnosing mechanical failures on VCRs (the majority of failures on the VCRs I usually got from people or at the thrifts were mechanical failures such as bad belts for example), fixing old TVs that had vertical or horizontal roll issues (mostly 1970s or 1980s vintage solid state portable TVs 13"-19" or so in size) and that was it.

I didn't get too involved in electrical issues with VCRs or TVs until just recently.