Philips N1500 (1971)

The Philips N1500 video cassette recorder cost nearly £600 when introduced in 1971 (equivalent to £3,400 in 2016). By comparison a small car (the Morris Mini) could be purchased for just over £600. This being the case they were then ideal for the rental machine market that was also just starting to take-off with colour televisions, and the Philips G8 television was one of the best, in my opinion ever made, and was introduced around the same time. I had just spent three years at technical collage as an apprentice to the television service trade and the 70's then found me plenty of work repairing these and colour TV's.

  Sadly though the VCR video format that Philips worked so hard on was a bit of a failure due to the complicated mechanical design of the machines and also the 60 minute cassettes were very prone to jamming-up too. It had many good features though; push loading tapes, built-in clock and timer (even though it looked like a cooker clock), and a modulator and 6 channel TV tuner that allowed you to play/record tapes on any domestic television. I think people can easily overlook how important these features were then and later. The later N-1512 had dc motors instead of mains and '8' type mains leads and a freeze frame button.

Slightly strange was the 1/2 teak cabinet that was dropped on later versions for the total use of plastic housing. To save space the cassettes had two spools of 1/2 inch tape was stacked on top of each other and the tape ran at high speed (11, 1/4" per second) and picture playback was was nearly as good as broadcast quality, unlike the early more successful VHS system in it's early days. Great for cross dubbing, I would record Top Of The Pops and then edit-out all the crap stuff after. Dubbing though created a distortion on the top of playback that needed a modification the the TV's time-base circuit, fitted as standard in later TV's. They were very heavy using an all metal chassis and basically modified washing machine mains motors.

 I still have a dozen or two of these very large video tape cassettes stored in my garage, they produced a VC-30, VC-45 and VC-60, they were very expensive to buy as blanks, around £20 for a 60 minute tape as late as 1980. I remember buying one in 1979 on the 10th anniversary of the Moon landing, so I could record an Horizon TV program special. As the VHS tape rental market started to take-off my company, Visionhire at this time started renting these machines out for 1/2 price, about £12.50 per month as the VHS & Beta-Max wars started to take off.

Early publicity photograph from a pamphlet Philips produced

When VHS finally won the 'Tape Wars' of the early 80's my company were getting rid of these machines for £20 each along with Philips' later version that used a slower tape speed, the N-1700, although the speed was different the tapes were interchangeable - but not interplay-able. I bought one and most members of my close family did too, and yes all machine later ended up my garage, apart from the N-1500 that now proudly displays itself in my home museum (picture at top of page, after I dusted it :-) The mains cables for these are quite unique if you buy one make sure it has it cable. I have over the years also collected it's service manual and operating instructions - I need to start charging it rent, lol At one time the value of these old machines was quite high (£350), but these days as more have turned up, price down to about £50. But it can still hold the label as the first domestic video recorder available in the UK.