Equipment Analysis: The Videotape Recorder - Text 1
The videotape recorder is an electronic device which records and plays back a video and audio signal on a cassette containing a magnetic strip. It was initially used industrially, before spreading to the home.
The earliest experiments in recording on a magnetic strip go back to the early 1900s, when a patent application was filed for recording images on a magnetic steel wire. The possibility of recording moving images began to be studied, in particular by John Logie Baird, as a result of developments in television from 1927. The videotape recorder (VTR) was then put into service beginning in the 1950s to record images and sounds by means of a longitudinal recording of the video signal on the tape. We might note its use by the American singer Bing Crosby, already a pioneer in the recording of performances for radio, who asked the engineer Jack Mullin to record his televised performances.[1] Improvements to the device continued in the industry, while remaining available exclusively to the television networks because of its prohibitive cost and its size. The machine’s standards with respect to the width of the recording strip gradually improved as it incorporated quicker instruments so that its results would be comparable to those of a live broadcast. The American company Ampex began to market the first transverse-scan tape recorder in 1956. It had four rotating heads, thereby considerably reducing the quantity of magnetic tape. Other companies – Sony, Toshiba and The Victor Company of Japan (JVC) – entered the race and in the late 1950s succeeded in producing versions which, although still expensive for the general public, were increasingly economical and rapid, in particular because of the use of so-called helical-scan video recording methods on the strip of tape.[2] JVC’s model operated with two rotating heads, which would later become the standard.[3] In fact although the four-head model was of good quality, it did not make stopping or slow motion possible. For this reason, the industry preferred the kinescope for another decade.
