Posted by Bill Vermillion on 01/12/01 11:39

In article <1138561816.491242.165600@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
<beckola@hotpop.com> wrote:
>
>NFord wrote:
>> <beckola@hotpop.com> wrote in message news:1138521343.905125.76540@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>> >I guess they will keep making them as long as people keep buying them,
>> > but I was
>> > wondering how long that will be.
>> >
>> > I have hundreds of videos I watch on and off. I'm not really interested
>> > in replacing them
>> > with DVDs. I have titles like Alien, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, etc. I
>> > still like watching them
>> > but I've seen them so many times, I don't feel like buying them on DVD.
>> >
>> > Just wondering how long the manufactures will be making the dual
>> > players, DVD/VCRs.
>>
>> They still make turntables...
>>
>> But if you like a movie well enough to watch
>> a relatively low-quality, "full-frame" version
>> of it again and again, then you like it enough
>> to pop for the movie on DVD and *really*
>> enjoy it.

>Thanks for the responses. It seems ironical because I didn't really
>have a
>large VHS collection until DVD became mainstream.

>I was at a garage sale where a guy was asking 50 cents to $1.00 for his
>videos. I asked how much for all them (300+ movies) and he said $100.00
>for the lot. I've been buying them as a "hobby" ever since.

>It's hard to explain, but its become addictive. Probably because you
>can
>buy videos for less than it use to cost to rent them.

>I wasn't aware that you can still buy turntables. Most likely this will
>be the
>case with VCRs many years from now.

Any decent machine shop could make a turntable. It takes a lot
more than that to make a VCR. As with much electronic equipment
the pieces/parts used to asemble them go out of production and when
it breaks it all over.

A friend of mine bought a Marconi standards convertor to translate
PAL to NTSC and also NTSC to PAL. He converted most of the Wild
World Of Sports for ABC for European distribution. That cost
him about $250,000 in 1967 [or thereabouts - which if you take
inflation into account adds up to a LOT of money by 2005 standards]

The last time I saw that beast - a full 6 foot rack with really
deep cards - it was waiting to have the cards cut up to retreive
the gold as the ICs needed to make it work had not been available
for years.

Also during that time he had the three networks with direct feeds
to his shop and he'd record the ABC, NBC and CBS nightly news
and then fly them to Puero Rico so the citizens there could see
Walter Cronkite et al 24 hours later.

For people who have grown up with instant communications anywhere
in the world [ if you concede that the absolute minimum propagation
delay is about 1/3 of a second] to envision a world where moving
images had to be flown by aircraft - and the only images that moved
faster were still pictures transmitted by 'wire-photo'.

The concept of those machines became similar to fax years later.

And news was made when Queen Elizabeth was crowned and COLOR
wirephotos showed up in newspaper with all the hoopla attendant
to the first color wirephoto transmission.

There had to be three passes for those, one for each of the color
separations. The only place I can immediately think of where you
get a hint of how those worked is in the film Call Northside 777.

Bill

--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com

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