V-Cord
| Media type | Magnetic Tape |
|---|---|
| Encoding | NTSC, PAL |
| Usage | Home movies |
V-Cord is an analog recording videocassette format developed and released by Sanyo. V-Cord (later referred to as V-Cord I) was released in 1974, and could record 60 minutes on a cassette. V-Cord II, released in 1976, could record 120 minutes on a V-Cord II cassette.
The V-Cord II machines were the first consumer VCRs to offer two recording speeds.
The original V-Cord cassette had a large hub and was wound with standard-thickness magnetic tape; V-Cord II used a small hub wound with thin tape, the same thickness later used for VHS-120 and Beta L-750. The cassettes were rectangular; unlike subsequent formats VHS and Betamax, which loaded with the tape facing front on the long side of the cassette, the V-Cord cartridge was loaded sideways with the narrow side serving as the "front" and the tape coming out the "side".
The tape was held in place in the machine by a notch halfway down the right side of the tape, similar to what holds an 8-track tape into its player.
The earliest machines recorded only in black and white and had no rewind mechanism, like the Cartrivision format of a few years earlier; an external rewinder was used after recording or playing a tape. External rewinders were later used with the VHS and Beta formats, although the machines could rewind tapes; external rewinders were considerably faster than the rewind function.
The system had two recording modes: standard mode (STD), and a long-play mode (LP) which sacrificed recording quality for extra capacity. In STD mode both recording and playback heads are used, writing both fields of each interlaced video frame. In long-play mode only a single head is used to record a single field from each video frame, with each field being read twice on playback, in a "skip field" technique. The heads scanned the tape in a helical scan fashion
Tape was moved forward at 2.91 inches per second in STD mode, and 1.45 inches per second in LP mode; this gave a recording time of one-hour in standard mode and two hours in long-play mode. Horizontal resolution in color was quoted as 250 lines in advertising materials, stretching to 300 lines in black-and-white, with a video signal-to-noise ratio of 45 dB. Audio response was specified as 80 to 10,000 Hz at -6 dB in STD mode, dropping to 80 to 8,000 Hz in LP mode.
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