[Steve Gardner]

I’ve been making 8 betacam sp tapes per week for about 6 years and shipping them to stations for a regional tv show. I’ve picked up two uvw-1800s, both in excellent condition, only using one at a time and keeping the other in storage as a backup in case of a breakdown. I’ve paid a local tv engineer friend to service them when there is a problem. I acquired both decks by looking for ebay auctions and restricting the search results to within driving distance of my area. When I spotted a deck with low hours I would contact the seller and see if they would agree to a pickup and payment by cashier’s check. That way you can see the deck before handing over the cash. Learn more about the built in hours meter system, you can tell a lot about a deck by these numbers and anyone selling one who doesn’t list them is most likely hiding something. Some decks have low hours on the heads, but they’ve been left powered on for 50,000 hours. You’ll see that the lower the hours, the higher the price. If you get lucky like I did, you can buy a uvw-1800 from another production company that bought the deck and didn’t end up using it that much. Those are the good finds. Definitely go with what your business dictates i.e. if you can get paid to make regular betacam sp dubs it would be smart to buy one if you can get a decent low hour deck.