CVA Blog

We’re looking forward to Christmas, and we hope you are too.

So, our last collection and delivery in Central London is on Wednesday 23rd, a day earlier than would be normal. We close the office at 1pm on Christmas Eve, and open again in the New Year on the 4th January.

It’s unlikely we’ll see any emails from you during our time off, but the telephones will be on divert if you have a great urgency to recycle your tapes.

With the introduction of the helical scan, or ’striping’ method, it became possible to record better quality images onto magnetic tape. Thus, the tape could be run at the same speed as it would in a fixed head system, but the bandwidth signals increased dramatically.

And how was this made possible?

By simply tilting the recorder head and spinning it as well. So the relative velocity is high, while the actual tape speed is low. An earlier fixed head system pioneered by the BBC in the 1950s (VERA) ran tape at speeds of 200 inches per second.

This tilted head solution imprints a diagonal stripe on the magnetic surface, though because the tape is moving, the strip is actually curved. That’s why it’s called a helical scan.

There are a few practical problems presented by this system. With the high speed of the head and tape, wear becomes an issue, so both surfaces need to be smoothly polished, and the head itself needs to be fashioned from highly durable material.

Also, supplying a signal to a rotating head becomes problematic. This is usually overcome by coupling the signal inductively through a rotary transformer, providing a more stable input into the head.

Mechanically, the way in which the tape is threaded around the heads is complex too, in order to allow the heads to record a complete stripe on the tape surface. The heads themselves are mounted on a rotating drum to allow for the azimuth recording.

Azimuth Recording

Because information from one recording stripe can’t be allowed to contaminate information from another, the two stripes must be isolated somehow. One solution would be to leave a gap between each stripe (guard bands), but this would waste valuable surface area.

So helical recorders adopt a method known as Azimuth Recording. The head drum contains two (or more) recording heads, with their magnetic gaps tilted slightly differently. One tilts left, one tilts right. This tilt is called the Azimuth adjustment. The result is that each head will not strongly read the signal recorded by the other, and the stripes can be alligned immediately adjacent to one another. In some cases, it is not uncommon for the stripes to overlap somewhat. Thus, the need for guard bands becomes redundant.

Sony

Sony, or to give it it’s full anglocized name, Soni Kabushiki-gaisha, recorded sales of $67 billion in 2004-2005. It is the leading manufacturer of video, communications, and information technology products for the consumer and professional market. With music, motion picture, television, computer entertainment and online businesses, Sony is perhaps the most comprehensive entertainment company in the world.

Not bad for a tiny recording company founded in 1946.

One of the co-founders was Masaru Ibuka. Born in 1908 in Nikko City, Japan, Ibuka attended the School of Science and Engineering at Waseda University. Here he earned the nickname “genius inventor”, a philosophy he carried forward into Sony. He was a leading force in the Japanese charge to be innovators in electronics, rather than simply reverse engineering products from the West.

After graduating in 1933, he worked at Photo-Chemical Laboratory, processing film. Then, as the war ended in 1945, he started a radio repair shop in a bombed out building in Tokyo. Here he met Akio Morita, and together they founded the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. This Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation built Japan’s first ever tape recorder, and marketed it as the Type G.

Ibuka bought the transistor to Japan, and they built the first Japanese transistor radio and the world’s first transistorized television. He was in the United States during the 1950s, where he heard about Bell’s invention of that transistor. While most American companies were concentrating their research on its application for the military, Ibuka saw its potential for communications, and licensed the technology. Thus, the radio became a viable commercial product, and the company began to take over the market.

What’s In A Name, Sonny?

Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo needed a romanized name to market themselves in the West. Sony came from the Latin word Sonus (meaning sonic or sound), the English word Sunny, and from the Japanese slang for “whiz kids”. Co-founder Akio Morita wanted a word that did not exist in any language, so that Sony could be claimed as a worldwide trademark. He also resisted the bank’s call to add Electronics to the name, because Morita did not want the Sony brand tied to any particular industry.

Fujifilm

Fuji Shashin Fuirumu Kabushiki-gaisha is better known as the Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd. Or even just Fujifilm. The Japanese producer of photographic film, cameras, video and digital media storage, was founded in 1934, and is based in Minato, Tokyo.

Positioned as a quality rival to Kodak, Fuji’s motion picture film is known for its smooth grain and vibrant colour rendition. Almost all of Steven Spielberg’s films are shot on Fuji stock.

In January of 1934, the company was established through the acquisition of a photo film division of Dainippon Celluloid, and operations began in February at the Ashigara factory.

Maxell

Hitachi Maxell Ltd, manufactures consumer electronics and video equipment. Maxell comes from a contraction of it’s first product – the MAXimum capacity dry cELL – and the company developed the first alkaline batteries in Japan, as well as the first audio cassette tapes.

The company was formed in 1961 out of the Nitto Electric Industrial Co. Ltd, though it did not adopt its present name until 1964. By 1973 it had introduced the world to high performance zinc manganese batteries, and in 1978 it released its first VHS video cassette tapes. It entered into the broadcast tape market in 1989 with the release of its own Betacam SP brand.

Ampex

Ampex was established in California, in 1944, by Alexander M. Poniatoff. It began by producing audio recording equipment, and in 1948 it’s Model 200 was used to time delay the first ever US radio broadcast of The Bing Crosby Show.

But it was the development of the Quadruplex video tape recorder that really changed broadcast history and stamped the brand into the consciousness of media types.

Ampex also pioneered the first ever slow-motion replay system. The HS-100 made it debut in 1967, on ABC, for the World Series of Skiing in Vail, Colorado. Later that same year, the VR-3000 revolutionised portable (OB) broadcasting, and for the first time video cameras could be strapped to boats, helicopters or planes.

In 1970, the ACR-25 was the first automated robotic library system for recording and playback of television commercials. Using cartridges, it allowed re-sequencing of ad breaks at a moments notice, and was adopted by newsrooms because of this random access capability.

Video Tape was actually a trademark of Ampex, so other companies used names such as TV Tape, or Television Tape, but like Hoover, Video Tape became the generic name for the technology.

Believe it or not, the first practical professional videotape machines were introduced as early as 1956. They were the open reel Ampex Quadruplex, a two inch tape recorder that worked with four transverse recording heads. This meant the heads scanned the tape across its width. A rival system, called VERA, pioneered by the BBC used a half inch tape, but this quickly faded away because of the massive speed the tape had to run – 200 inches per second.

Quadruplex was in standard use for 20 years in spite of its shortcomings. It did not have the ability to freeze frame, picture search, and the reels wore out very quickly. It was best practice for tapes to be erased and re-used because of their high cost. This meant that tape became a better and more cost-effective time delay for broadcasters, especially in the four time zones across the US.

A one inch format gained prominence in the 1970s. C-Format finally introduced shuttling and still-frame features, but most agreed that the sound and picture reproduction were inferior to that of Quadruplex.

At the same time, a cassette tape was launched. Sony developed the three quarter inch composite U-Matic, and later refined the format into Umatic SP. These tapes were still being widely used in British advertising firms as late as 2005, due to their massive durability and the fact that they had been designed to be recycled by professional evaluation machines. This lead to their dramatic increase in life.

Likewise, the later tape formats of the Betacam family. Starting with Betamax, through Betacam SP, Digital Betacam, Betacam SX and today’s HDCam. These tapes are still widely used today, again because of their excellent video and sound quality, and the ability to recycle them.

Consumer Formats

It wasn’t until the 1970s that video cassette recorders were released on the domestic, home-use market. Two rival formats were launched by the Japanese companies Sony and JVC. Sony’s was an extension of their Beta brand, and actually provided better video and sound capture, but the cheaper equipment meant that JVC’s VHS format finally won through. Developments remained stagnant for the next 25 years, in spite of the improved S-VHS and D-VHS follow ups. It wasn’t until the battle with DVD that VHS slipped into obsolescence.

But in Camcorders, the range of formats was much more diverse. Early models used the VHS or Betamax tapes, then 8mm gained prominence for some time. More recently, MiniDV has become the popular choice for domestic camcorder users worldwide. The format provides near broadcast quality video and a sophisticated nonlinear editing capability on consumer equipment. The trend at the moment is either towards the HD version of MiniDV, HDV, or towards solid state or hard disk storage.