[Bruce Sanders]

I spent over 10 years dealing with 3/4″ U-matics. Sony developed the format to be a “prosumer” product, but, almost at the same time came out with the BVU broadcast line, which had many more built in and optional features such as a TBC and SMPTE timecode. Many small TV stations used BVU VCR’s to broadcast nearly everything and even the networks used their BVU u-matics to broadcast news, and in some cases, it was broadcast right from the edit bay because of time constraints. Near the end of its life, the U-matic SP line appeared with (slightly better quality), which could be compared with the difference between plain VHS and VHS-HQ.

Because I was afraid of getting caught with hundreds of tapes and no way to play or transfer them, I first bought a set of 2860 editors to keep new in the box and then a pair of 5850 editors, which I just recently took out of the cartons to do a job with. What looked great at the time, is VERY disappointing by todays standards. Today, tape is virtually obsolete.