This is the seventh in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets. Click here for the beginning of the series.

For many, many years it’s been relatively easy to connect TVs and VCRs to cable systems. The cable simply comes in from the wall, goes into the VCR, comes out of the VCR, and goes into the television. If you wanted a slightly better picture quality out of your VCR you could also connect AV cables from the VCR to the television. These consist of a set of three red, white, and yellow RCA-style cables that transmit video on yellow and left and right audio on white and red cables respectively. In fact that you have a stereo VCR and a stereo television, these AV cables were the only way you can get to stereo sound out of your VCR. Although the cable signals coming from the cable company have stereo audio in most cases, and the VCR tuner is capable of decoding a stereo audio signal and recording in stereo. The Channel 3 or Channel 4 output of VCR does not output stereo audio to your television. Many people don’t realize that but they don’t seem to notice.

Over the years the number of cable channels increased dramatically. At one point Time Warner cable had channels all the way into the low 90s but in more recent years these analog cable channels only reach up to Channel 74 and then skip to 98, 99 on our system. As our cabin in Brown County, the cable system we use only goes up to about 48 and then skips to 98, 99.

Because the capabilities of analog cable had been maximized, the cable companies have come up with a new system to add more channels and more features such as pay-per-view and video on demand as well as onscreen channel guides. They achieve these additional channels and features using what is called “digital cable”. Again we now needed some sort of cable converter box. Fortunately a modern cable box has a remote-controlled electronic tuner and tons of features. The modern digital cable box is actually a small computer connected to the cable company on a computer network that runs through the cable lines. It’s sort of like a closed internet system. Each cable box has an IP address just like the computers on the internet. Information travels both ways along the network. The cable company sends information to your cable box and the cable box can send information back to the cable company. This facilitates such features as pay-per-view and on demand viewing. The cable company can even upgrade the software in the cable box to add new features in the future.

Channel numbers starting at 100 and upwards are not transmitted using traditional analog television signals. Rather they are transmitted as computer information stored in compressed digital form. They can transmit many more channels using the same amount of bandwidth if they are transmitted in this digital form. As many as six digital channels can be transmitted using the same bandwidth as a single analog channel. The real problem is that your so-called cable ready TVs and VCRs can no longer directly access these channels.

Most of your premium channels such as HBO, Showtime, Cinemax as well as some of the more obscure cable channels have all been moved into these digital channel numbers. But for the most part the most popular basic cable channels are still in the 2-99 range that are accessible from cable ready TVs and VCRs. These include all of your broadcast channels which are retransmitted through the cable, ESPN, ESPN2, all the cable news stations, history, discovery, TBS, TNT etc.

A typical hookup for one of the systems is as follows: the cable comes in from the wall and goes into a RF splitter. One of the outputs of the splitter goes to the cable box. The other output goes to your VCR. Your cable box is then connected to your television using red, white, yellow AV cables although some people use a short RF cable. Note that using an RF cable to connect your cable box to your TV means you do not get stereo audio. Also you connect the output of your VCR to another AV input on your TV. If you have a three-way cable splitter you can also connect a third RF connector directly to your TV which gives you even more capabilities.

Given this set up, you can simultaneously watch any cable channel through the cable box and record any analog cable channel to your VCR. Or alternatively you can use your VCR to record a digital channel through the cable box and watch and analog channel on your TV. The only thing you can not do is record one digital channel while watching a different digital channel.

For many years I had a cable box in the living room and in my bedroom. If I desperately needed to record two digital shows at the same time I could record one of them in the living room and one of them in the bedroom.

People who have satellite dishes have to have a satellite box to watch any channel. All the channels from a satellite are digitally encoded. There is no analog cable when using a satellite and so a cable ready tuner doesn’t do any good. Satellite users either need a separate satellite box for the VCR or they cannot watch and record two different things simultaneously. (Note: some satellite boxes are dual tuner so you can record and watch different things at once but most are single tuner.)

This limitation of satellite and the expanded capabilities of analog cable are the main reasons I’ve always had cable rather than satellite.

The consumer-electronics industry realized that it had innovated its way away from one of its greatest interventions: the cable ready tuner. They convinced the cable industry to come up with a new system called a “Cable Card”. Newer top-of-the-line HDTV’s have been made with a slot where you can insert small electronic card about the size of a credit card. You rent this card from your cable company for about $1 a month. It allows your television to receive all of the digital and analog channels that your cable system uses. With such a card, you would no longer need a cable box and your television would once again be cable ready.

Recall that I said cable boxes actually have two-way communication between you and the cable company. Such two-way communication is necessary for the onscreen guide, pay-per-view and on demand services. Unfortunately the cable card system is only a one-way system so the advantages of these features are not available if you have just a cable card. I never used pay-per-view and have rarely used on demand services but I would really miss the onscreen cable guide. My HDTV in the living room has a cable card slot but I still use my regular cable box anyway. I’ve never seen a VCR or DVD recorder that is cable card ready although I have read that some DVR/TiVo recorders may have cable card slots. In fact if your DVR needs to record two shows at once it actually needs two cable cards. The latest TiVo model HD DVR has two cable card slots.

The cable industry is still arguing over standards for a more useful two-way cable card system. So if we ever get full cable ready TVs with a second-generation cable card, it’s going to be a long way off. One of the problems is that the cable industry can charge you more for the rental of a cable box than they can charge for a cable card. They can also customize their features more easily in a cable box. Although they want happy customers who can easily use their service it is not completely in their best interest to adopt cable card technology.

Given that the cable card system really isn’t as functional as it could be and given the increased flexibility provided by cable ready tuners in TVs and VCRs, you would think that the consumer-electronics industry would want to keep cable ready tuners available in TVs and VCRs for the foreseeable future.

By the way, although these articles have been focusing mostly on VCRs, the
same thing holds true for DVD recorders and digital hard drive recorders such as TiVo and DVRs. Cable ready tuners are disappearing from these devices as well.

In our next installment we will try to determine if this absence of tuners is a limited thing overly widespread and we will try to discover the reasons why it is occurring.

This is the sixth in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets. Click here for the beginning of the series.

When cable TV systems first came along, they typically transmitted about 30 channels of television through the cable. In order to receive these stations, you needed a cable box. The first cable box we had was about the size of a book. It had a slider switch with about 30-some positions on it numbered 2 up to 40 I believe. The cable was a coaxial RF cable just like you would use to connect a roof antenna to your TV. It would come from the telephone pole at the back of your house into your home. From there it generally went through the attic, down the wall and exited out a small plate in your wall. You would connect that to the cable box and another coaxial RF cable would connect the cable box to the antenna connector on your TV set. You would set your TV on channel 3 or channel 4. Because Channel 4 was already occupied in this area we always used Channel 3 for connecting external devices such as cable boxes or VCRs. You would then position a slider lever on whatever channel you wanted to watch. There was also a small thumbwheel on one side that you would use as a fine-tuning wheel because the mechanical tuner did not accurately select the proper frequencies.

There was no remote-control capability. The slider box generally had a very long cord on it that you have to route behind some furniture or drape across your living room floor where you would trip over it.

You would think that if you already had a TV that could tune channels 2-83 that you wouldn’t need an external tuner to get channels 2-40. The problem is that cable TV systems use different frequencies than broadcast TV. Keep in mind when I said earlier that a channel number is NOT like the frequency on a radio dial. If you turn your FM dial to 93.1, that is an actual frequency in megahertz. The number of a TV channel has no mathematical relationship to the actual frequency used. They could have designed radio with channels and said that for example radio channel 17 would be assigned to specific frequency like 93.1 but that’s not how radio was designed. Television was indeed designed that way. The channel numbers are just arbitrary positions along a frequency spectrum.

It’s difficult to get UHF frequencies to travel along a cable. VHF frequencies travel much better. In cable TV systems, channels 2-13 are identical to the broadcast VHF channel frequencies. If all you wanted to watch on cable TV was channels 2-13, you could simply plug the cable directly into an older TV set and it worked just fine. Cable channels 14 and higher are a completely different set of VHF frequencies that are lower than UHF frequencies. Also I mentioned that there is a gap between channels 6 and 7. Some cable TV systems put as many as five different channels in frequencies in that gap.

One early alternative to the cable tuner box was a gadget called a “block converter”. It was a little electronic device you could buy at TV/video stores. It would convert VHF cable channels 14 and upwards into UHF frequencies. You can then use the UHF tuner on your TV or VCR to access all of the cable channels. The problem was the block converter was only good up to about channel 35 or 36. In the early days of cable, Comcast only had about that many channels but Time Warner cable (which is now called Bright House cable) had about 40 channels so the upper few channels with a block converter didn’t work very well with Time Warner systems.

Eventually they began producing TVs and VCRs which were advertised as “cable ready”. These were remote-control TVs and VCRs with electronic (non-mechanical) tuners that would precisely tune the proper frequencies for not only VHF and UHF broadcast channels but most if not all VHF cable channels. Initially they advertised them as “108 channels cable ready” or perhaps 109. Various cable systems throughout the country use different sets of channels and not all “cable ready” devices worked with all cable systems. Eventually TVs and VCRs which had 127 channel cable ready tuners were created and they worked with all cable systems in existence.

For those of us who struggled through the eras of clunky mechanical channel changers, fine-tuning dials, UHF tuner dials, mechanical slider cable boxes with no remote, block converters that barely worked and God knows what other hassles… the introduction of the truly cable ready tuner in TVs and VCRs was an absolute godsend!

In the next installment we will see how the introduction of digital cable messed things up for those of us who really love our cable ready devices.

This is the fifth in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets. Click here for the beginning of the series.

Before we go exploring the mystery of the disappearing tuners in VCRs let’s take a look back at how cable ready tuners came into being and why they were such an important development.

TV signals are just radio waves that travel through the air like regular radio. Such signals are often called RF signals (radio frequency). In television, the RF signals not only contain audio information, they also contain video information as well. The tuner on a television set could be a smooth turning dial with frequency numbers on it just like a radio receiver. However to simplify things they picked specific frequencies and assigned them channel numbers. Originally only numbers 2-13 were defined. These are known as VHF frequencies (very high frequencies). It wasn’t until 1952 that the FCC designated additional channels 14-83 called UHF (ultra high frequency) channels. In the early 1980s channels 70-83 were reassigned to wireless phones. Click here for a Wikipdeia article about UHF broadcasting.

Early televisions had only VHF tuners which were a clunky dial that snapped into place from one channel to the next. Because this mechanical dial didn’t always hit the frequency exactly, you usually had another dial that you could turn back and forth smoothly that was called “fine-tuning”. It would adjust the frequency of the RF receiver in your TV set. In order to get UHF channels, typically would turn your VHF dial to a position “U” and then turned a smooth turning UHF dial to tune a UHF channel. Some UHF dials actually had fixed positions for each channel that would click into place but most simply had a smooth turning dial like a radio dial.

In 1962 the federal government mandated that all new television sets have a UHF tuner by 1964. The argument was that it was unfair to license a television station to broadcasts on a frequency that no one was able to receive. There are those that argue that this saved UHF stations but there are others who argue that initially cost consumers millions of dollars for TV tuners but most of them did not really need. When I was growing up we only had four channels here in Indianapolis. Channel 13 was the ABC affiliate. Channel 8 was the local CBS channel. Channel 6 broadcast NBC and Channel 4 was an independent channel from Bloomington. (No that is not a typo… at one point Channel 13 and 6 swapped affiliations to the current state of affairs where 13 is NBC and 6 is ABC). Eventually a local PBS station began broadcasting on UHF Channel 20. It’s much more recently that religious broadcasting began using Channel 40 and a local Fox network affiliate was established on Channel 59.

As I explained in a previous post, my first VCR had about a dozen individual tiny tuner dials that you would tune to specific channels using a small thumbwheel. There was also a small three position toggle switch to select lower VHF, higher VHF, or UHF channel ranges. If you drew a frequency graph and plotted the channel numbers on it you would see there is a large gap of frequencies between VHF channels 6 and 7. That is why the VHF channels were split into low and high ranges.

Eventually mechanical tuners and dial tuners were replaced by more modern electronic tuners that were much more compatible with remote controls. Early remote control TVs actually had a motor which turned the TV dial for you. Electronic tuners had no moving parts and were able to select frequencies precisely so a fine-tuning dial wasn’t necessary. For this brief era, everything was just fine. That is until cable TV came along and missed everything up!

In our next installment, we will discuss the chaos that came with the introduction of cable TV.

This is the fourth in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets. Click here for the beginning of the series.

As I mentioned earlier, my Toshiba VCR is probably my favorite. I really wanted to replace it with another Toshiba model. I went to BestBuy.com and HHGregg.com and eventually picked out a Toshiba model SD-V295 DVD/VCR combo that looked a lot like my existing Toshiba VCR with a DVD stuck on the side (image on right). They generally don’t have VCRs on display in the store where you can play with them or checkout features, so I just sent my dad over to H.H.Gregg to pick it up and bring it home. We took it out of the box and I looked at the back of unit. Here’s what I saw… or rather what I didn’t see!

I did not see any coaxial RF connectors! It meant that this VCR had no tuner. It would only work if you connected it to a cable box or satellite box. I couldn’t believe it! I usually look at the online photos, especially the detailed photos of the back like the one I’ve shown here. I think that I may have actually looked at this image at BestBuy.com to verify that the component video outputs were for the DVD portion only which was as I expected. I just didn’t realize that there was no cable connector for connecting analog cable or antenna.

I did a lot of head scratching trying to figure out if I could make it work with my set up. Eventually I concluded that I would lose too much functionality by giving up the ability to record from analog cable. I searched around a little bit more and found a really nice Sony SLV-D 370P DVD/VCR combo. I very carefully looked at the images of the back side and verified it really did have an RF coax input and output. We packed up the Toshiba, returned it, and purchased the Sony. It’s a really nice looking model with good features and all of the right connectors.

All of this occurred in mid-April 2007. There’s more to this story but I want to jump in briefly to early July 2007. The JVC VCR in my office started acting flaky. It takes about four attempts to get a tape to insert properly. It keeps trying to eject it and the VCR or even turn on at all without a tape in it. When you turn it on, it tries to load the tape on the heads and when there is no tape in the machine something jams and the machine shuts itself off. Since I’ve been having pretty good luck with my new Sony I decided to get another one for the office. Much to my surprise it wasn’t available anymore. The Sony model 370 had been replaced by model 380 which was virtually identical except it had no RF inputs or outputs and no tuner.

To further my shock and dismay none of the VCRs that were available had a tuner! I thought that the tunerless Toshiba was just some cheap model that they were putting out there because more and more people are using satellite which does not have analog cable capabilities like regular digital cable does. Satellite users have to have a separate box for every TV and every VCR (although some satellite boxes are dual tuner). I was now discovering that VCRs with tuners had been completely withdrawn from the market!

I did finally find a Sony 370 at Amazon.com for sale through a third-party reseller. Amazon itself did not have it.

In our next installment we will take a nostalgic look back at early TV tuners before we discuss the invention of the cable ready TV and VCR. Only then can we fully appreciate the mystery of the missing tuners!

This is the third in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets. Click here for the beginning of the series.

When Sony first introduced the Betamax video recorder I immediately began reading up everything I could about them and later about the competing VHS format introduced by JVC. It was very interesting to watch the battle between these two incompatible tape formats. Although VHS was of inferior quality, it became more widely accepted. Eventually VHS pushed Betamax out of the marketplace thanks to restrictive licensing policies by Sony and the porn industry’s acceptance of VHS. Check out this article about the rise and fall of Beta. The current a battle between incompatible competing Sony BluRay DVD and HD DVD formats is reminiscent of the old Betamax versus VHS battle.

I kept hoping that prices would come down so that I could someday afford one of these dream machines of either format. I remember talking to a salesman about a $450 Betamax and he assured me that never in my lifetime would I see a VCR cheaper than $400. “They are just too complicated a machine to be made any cheaper than that” he insisted. I had spent too much time working with computers and their ever falling prices and ever-increasing capabilities to know that that was a ridiculous assumption. As I said earlier, VCRs bottomed out at about $50-$60 before their untimely demise.

Thanks to a rather generous disability insurance policy from when I worked at IU Genetics Research, I managed to find myself with an unusual amount of disposable income and ended up paying about $1300 for my first VCR. It was an RCA SelectaVision convertible VCR model VFP-170. I’m not sure when I purchased it but here’s a press release dated February 1981. The image on the right is an advertisement for this model. It was called convertible because it was designed to be used as both a tabletop and a portable VCR to be used with a separate video camera. My friend Stu Byram (the one who recorded me singing ” I’m a little Teapot” as a toddler) also had been that same model VCR and had a camera to go with it On a couple of occasions he loaned me his camera to use with my portable recorder.

Amazingly this machine was so primitive that the remote-control was hardwired. That’s right… to work the remote-control you had to drape a 10 foot wire from your TV set to your easy chair. Below are some images of another almost identical model VGP 170 NR which did finally come with a wireless remote. This recently listed on eBay with a minimum bid of $19.95 and it include a camera but it had no bids! As I said earlier I paid $1300 for it.

In this image the piece on the right is the tuner which remained connected to your television and your antenna (this was pre-cable days). The piece on the left was the “portable” recorder which connected to the tuner by a thick cable in the back.

Note that the tuner section had a series of about a dozen buttons which were used to select the channel to record. If you opened a little access hatch on top they were a series of a dozen tiny little thumb wheels that you used to manually tune in your stations. There was a little tiny toggle switch to select VHF channels 2-13 or UHF channels 14-82. The concept of a “cable ready” device was still years off. You could program the device to record anything up to 14 days in advance and not only would it record in standard SP two-hour mode it would also record in four-hour LP mode but it also would use the new six-hour SLP recording mode!

A few years later my uncle Keith bought the RCA model VJP900 which is shown here.

Rather than connect the two pieces using a cable, this one had a sort of docking station that you used to connect the portable section. The model shown here sold on eBay recently for $1.75. Ironically Keith never did buy a camera to go with his “convertible” VCR.

Eventually I did buy an RCA camera of my own to go with it. Note in these days they didn’t call them camcorders because they were not camera and recorder all in one. Dad created a camera mount that allowed me to connect the camera to my wheelchair armrest. We would hang the recorder section on the back of my wheelchair in a bag and even supplanted the battery power of the recorder by plugging a cable into my wheelchair battery. We had to wire in three little buttons on the end of a cable so that I can use the pause/record, zoom in, and zoom out functions. I will have more on these famous the buttons in a later installment here.

I really liked my uncle’s VCR because it had stereo sound capability and you could audio dub to put in narration, music or sound effects. I borrowed his VCR one time so that I could do tape to tape editing of some video I shot in the garage area at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I put music in one stereo channel and did narration in the other channel.

I recently dug out that old edited videotape that I had shot at the Speedway which included in narration. Much to my surprise the narration was no longer there. That old stereo VCR used linear recording tracks instead of the flying heads that modern hi-fi stereo VCR’s used today. apparently current VCRs can’t handle that kind of stereo any more.

I don’t remember why or when I got rid of that VCR. At some point I replaced the camera with a new 8mm camcorder. I seem to recall my next big VCR was a very fancy model for which I paid about $900. Its claim to fame was something called “digital effects”. It had some sort of digital frame buffer that when you hit the pause button it would digitally capture the frame and display it perfectly clear from the buffer. It also had some other digital effects built in similar to the kinds of special effects you find built into today’s camcorders. I thought I would use these effects in editing videos but it turned out I never really did any more of that kind of thing.

Well that’s enough nostalgia for now… in the next installment we will talk about about my quest to replace my Toshiba VCR with a VCR/DVD combo even though I didn’t need the DVD section in my bedroom. I will discover it’s not as easy as I expected it to be.

This is the second in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets. Click here for the beginning of the series.

I’ve always been fascinated by tape recording ever since I was about four years old and our family friend Stu Byram recorded me singing “I’m a Little Teapot” on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. When I was about 8 or 9 years old I got a small 3-1/2″ reel-to-reel machine for my birthday. Being the pioneer that I am… I remember taking the tape recorder to the drive-in movie with me to record music from movies like “Mary Poppins” and “AHard Day’s Night“. I swear I’ve never taken a camcorder into a movie theater but I sure was ahead of my time when it came to bootleg soundtracks. It’s a shame that drive-in movies are so rare these days. It sure would be easy to sneak in your camcorder into a drive-in. However the sound quality sure would leave a lot to be desired.

When I was about 12 or 13 years old I moved up to a regular audio cassette player/recorder with a built-in AM/FM radio and my bootlegging ways continued. I would sit there listening to the FM radio waiting for my favorite songs to come on and I would flip it to record as the song started. In fact I would sit there for hours sometimes hitting record just as the DJ would stop talking in hopes that I could catch more of the beginning of the song. If it was a song I didn’t want or already had, I would simply stop the tape, backup little bit, and cue it up for the next song. I was very popular among the kids in the neighborhood because I had a great collection of the latest music and it didn’t cost me a dime.

Another favorite pastime I had was making comedy recordings in the form of a man-on-the-street interview where all the answers to my questions were a line out of a song. I had figured out how to wire into my record player so that I could directly connect it to my tape recorder even though the record player didn’t have a “line out” jack. I would use a microphone to ask a question like “What is your name Miss?” And then I would record a brief few seconds from the Beatles song “Elinor Rigby” from a 45 rpm record. I would then ask “How are you today?” And I would play few seconds of James Brown screaming “I feel good!” And the comedy would deteriorate from there.

I always figured if I was a little bit smarter I could figure out how to connect a television to a cassette recorder but of course if that was possible, somebody would have done it. Audio cassette recorders barely have enough capability to record decent audio let alone the amount of bandwidth you needed to do video.

It turns out that in 1987 Fisher Price did make a toy black-and-white camcorder that used a standard audio cassette for recording. It was called the PXL-2000 PixelVision KiddieCorder. I never owned one because by that time I already had a real camcorder. But I always thought it was great they figured out how to do it. One recently sold on eBay for about $50. Also check out this article from Wikipedia.

Later in high school my fascination with video recording led me to hangout briefly with the high school Audiovisual Club at Northwest High School even though it was the nerdiest group of people in the school. They had a black-and-white camera and video tape recorder that they used to tape basketball and football games for the coaches. Unfortunately all of the tape to place high in the bleachers or a press box so I couldn’t help out with that and I really didn’t have much time to participate in extracurricular activities because the bus would pick me up about 15 or 20 minutes after my last class.

It wasn’t until the early 1980s that my dream of video recording in the home would come through when I purchased my first VCR. Read all about that in our next installment.

This is the first in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets.

There are currently four VCRs in my home in addition to a DVR/cable box in my living room. You would think the loss of one VCR wouldn’t put a crimp in my style. After all there are still three other VCRs and the digital recorder in the cable box can record two different programs at once. The VCR in the living room we rarely use anymore because we have the DVR/cable box. The living room VCR is mostly used these days copy things off of the DVR on to tape so that I can watch them in my bedroom. The VCR in my office is used for transferring things from my computer to tape. It’s connected to the computer using a Pinnacle Studios Dazzle 150 analog video converter box. In my bedroom I watch a lot of tape in bed at night but sometimes there’s something I want to record while I’m watching so I really need two VCRs in the bedroom. It’s also nice to have two VCRs in the same room connected to each other so did you ever wonder copy something from one tape to another it is easy to do so. Also there have been times when I needed to record as many as four shows while watching a fifth one cy do really need several VCRs.

The living room, office, and one of the bedroom VCRs are all JVC which is really handy because my multifunction remote control can handle all of them using just one device on my a device remote. The other VCR in the bedroom was a Toshiba and it was probably my favorite one in the house. It seemed to handle old crinkly tapes or poorly recorded tapes better than any machine in the house. I liked the fact that every time you hit play, stop, rewind, or fast forward it would briefly display the tape counter onscreen. You did not have to hit a display button to get the tape counter to show. It was the VCR in the bedroom that I used while watching TV in bed and the JVC model was a backup.

So the other day it started making funny noises and it ate up a tape and refused to eject it. Dad tried to take apart and figure out what was wrong but it kept eating tapes and jamming the eject mechanism. So I decided to go online to BestBuy.com to pick out a new one.

They didn’t have any!

Neither did Circuit City… or H.H.Gregg… or anywhere else I looked.

I couldn’t believe it but nobody makes just plain VCRs anymore! You have to buy a DVD/VCR combination. In fact there are very few models that are just DVD/VCRs. Most of them nowadays are DVD recorders with a built-in VCR. It used to be you could get a really nice 4-head hi-fi stereo VCR for about $50. The VCR/DVD combos cost as much as $100 and the ones with DVD recorders are as much as twice that.

I think the signs are very clear that the VCRs days ar e numbered. That amazing old friend of ours the VHS VCR is going the way of BetaMax, and 8-track audio tapes… and come to think of it regular audiocassettes have pretty much disappeared as well. It’s not just good by VCR… it’s goodbye to tape in general!

This horrifying revelation has prompted me to reflect on my personal history of VCRs. In the next installments we’ll talk about my passion for recording and my first VCR. Then we will discover an even more amazing secret about VCRs and even DVD recorders that are losing one of their greatest features. Stay tuned as the mystery reveals itself!

I’m taking time out from talking about all of my medical problems to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and to share with them my computer-generated Christmas card.

Click image to enlarge
This card was designed, computer modeled and computer rendered by me.

Created using the Persistence of Vision™ Ray-Tracer POV-Ray™ version 3.6 freeware rendering program which I helped create. For details see http://www.povray.org/

The model contains over 120,000 objects. There are 139 light bulbs each of which contributes illumination to the scene. There are 249 branches consisting of 66,603 needles. There are 62 loops of garland created from 28,816 pieces of tinsel. There are 98 sphere ornaments. The angel and packages were adapted from previous card designs.

It took about 30 hours to design, test render and re-design. The final image was rendered at 1425 x 2325 (300 dpi) resolution. It took 21 hours 57 to render on a 3.2 ghz Pentium 4HT computer running Windows XP Home Edition.

For more information on my images and to purchase posters visit:
http://cyborg5.com/art

©2006 Chris Young, All rights reserved.