Are there any collectors of old video equipment out there?
Video cassette recorders, reel to reel video recorders, or machines with unusual formats?

Philips VCR. Philips long play. V2000. U-matic. EIAJ. AKAI Standard etc.

I would like to think that I am not the only collector of older video equipment, and would like to talk to others afficted by the collectors disease.

Wayne.

I used to, when I had the room for it. I remember my old JVC U-matic clunker, with a video head the size of a brake drum and it took about ten seconds to extract the tape and go through its motions. It produced a bloody good picture though. I used to use it to record Prisoner for later viewing and the 60 minute tape that I used for this lasted for around three years.

Lifting it every time I shifted house was probably what screwed my back.

I had some Ampex model 5000 helical consumer VTRs from 1965 - only 9 years after first VTR! They had large 5.5 inch headwheels (compare them to VHS headwheel in photo.)

They seemed to be totally made in USA until I looked closer and saw the name Yaskawa in small print on the rather advanced headwheel direct drive pancake motor!

Had not heard of Yaskawa before but they are now into robotics with 10,000 employees while Ampex is down to almost nothing!

I've got half a dozen old machines - back to the late 60s. I always dream of the day I'll have time to restore one or two. But imagine changing all those small electros!!!!!! Ahhhhh.

Hello,
Not so much the analogue players, but I did fall in love with Sony Trinitron PVM/BVM that I first found on Gumtree,
and then found a few more from ABC auctioning theirs off. I also picked up some standard definition sat TV boxes of ABC’s
that I got working. Foxtel happen to give away a few channels free of encryption, just not the particularly interesting ones.
ABC is included in it though, so I can watch ABC with their own previous equipment, all except for their sat dishes!

Since you asked for unusual, I have two Commodore Amiga CD32 consoles, each equipped with fairly rare, and early
VCD player modules which were the first device to make use of a hardware MPEG1 decoder IC (made by C-Cube).
Basically the first reasonable way you could have ever gotten any digital full motion video into your home in 1993.
I have figured out how to author a bunch of music video VCDs to play on these.

There is a little more, but one thing I was always fond of is a pocket Casio analogue colour LCD TV I used to take hiking.
I managed to pick one of those up near new. They were junk, but that one is probably just a bit of nostalgia for me.

Cheers, Brek.