b said:
JR North ha escrito:
or alternatively you could try to repair it (after all this is REPAIR
not JUNK IT newsgroup!)
first, open the case and see if there is some obstruction or foreign
object inside.. look also on fixer.com for your model. maybe a belt has
perished or the casette basket is out of alignment with the rest of the
deck.
-B.
The purpose of this newsgroup notwithstanding, we have to be
practical about these things. It's a matter of economics. Depending
entirely on how much the original poster paid for the VCR when it was
new, it may not be cost-effective to have it repaired. It can cost more
just to have the unit looked at in a repair shop before any work is
done than a new VCR costs these days. I've seen new VCR/DVD dual decks
by Emerson (!) et al. going for under $50 at Big Lots, so if it will
cost much more than that to have yours repaired, I'd just pitch the old
machine and get a new one. Besides, if you have your VCR repaired,
again depending on how long you've had it, you may run into other
problems with it in the future.
Of course, if this is an expensive unit with stereo/MTS sound and so
on, I'd say by all means at least have it looked at. I once had a
Panasonic VCR with VCR+ I'd had for a couple of years that ate a
cassette. Paid something like $80-90 for it when it was new in the late
'90s. Didn't have it fixed. Knowing that it probably would have cost
me more to have it looked at and/or repaired (before I tried to get the
tape out myself) than I'd paid for it when new, I just threw in the
towel and bought a brand new one from HH Gregg the next day (same
brand, only no VCR+).
Most modern VCRs have plastic gears and other parts anyway, which are
very prone to breakage after a certain length of time. Also, many if
not most VCRs made in the last ten or fifteen years or so, and all
recent ones, have few if any belts; the drive mechanism mostly relies
on gears. It is possible for gear trains to go out of sync after X
number of years as well, so this has to be considered as a possible
cause of the trouble being described. However, there is the repair cost
to be considered as well, so it may not be worth it.
VCRs are obsolete technology these days anyhow. I'd get either a dual
deck (DVD/VHS) or a standalone DVD recorder and transfer all my VHS
cassettes to DVD eventually. DVDs take up less room in a storage area
than VHS tapes; DVDs usually produce much better pictures than VHS as
well, and DVDs (the discs themselves) don't wear out or jam, etc. as
VHS cassettes can and often do over time. One could use this argument
to make a good case for transferring audio cassettes to CDs as well,
as I am presently doing with my large collection of audio tapes.
The sound quality of CDs (and DVDs) is much better than cassettes as
well. VHS cassette sound tracks are not usually recorded in stereo, let
alone surround sound; many if not most commercial DVDs do have stereo
sound, Dolby 5.1 and all the other refinements the digital video age
has spawned.
I realize all of this may not be what you want to hear (read), but
from a practical standpoint it makes sense. As I said a couple of
paragraphs ago, if your VCR is very recent (and out of warranty) or
only a few years old, having it repaired may get it working for now,
but the machine could develop other more serious problems in the
future; the next time it goes bad, the problem may be serious enough
(bad heads, etc.) not to be worth repairing--you'd wind up pitching the
unit anyway.
It's your choice, of course, but I just wanted to point out that
having a VCR repaired that you only paid, say, $60 or less for at a
discount store could cost more than a brand new one with stereo sound
and perhaps a DVD deck. Again, I'd consider getting a dual DVD/VHS unit
and eventually shelving or outright getting rid of your old obsolete
VHS cassettes. As kids say these days, VHS is soooooo '80s!
Kind regards,
Jeff, WB8NHV (email addy not shown to deter spammers)
Fairport Harbor, Ohio USA
