So over on tyhis panel you've got the usual controls. On off, and tuning, with some strange hue/volume/gain controls. It's a Teledyne Packard Bell, which isn't special...pic.twitter.com/2tZ8e7S4zd
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So over on tyhis panel you've got the usual controls. On off, and tuning, with some strange hue/volume/gain controls. It's a Teledyne Packard Bell, which isn't special...pic.twitter.com/2tZ8e7S4zd
The back looks pretty normal, although there's some weird connectors over there on the right...pic.twitter.com/DsVV4AfBF2
So let's open the left side and WAIT A MINUTE WHAT IS THISpic.twitter.com/rHHmGaOMhL
So Cartrivision is an early (1972) home video format which had some wacky DRM nonsense (well, ARM I guess, it's not digital) and it only lasted about a year, and one of the reasons it's impossible to play now is that you couldn't just buy a VCR for it.pic.twitter.com/2DjQPaNb03
instead you had to buy a TV with a cartrivision player built into it, and since those were all huge 1970s console TVs the number of them that have survived until the modern day is basically zero.pic.twitter.com/J0f9RTlntj
The wacky DRM thing was that most movies only came on red tapes, and the key distinction between red tapes and black tapes is that YOU COULDN'T REWIND RED TAPESpic.twitter.com/EDdS8D7MRK
so not only did you have to rent them, you could only watch them once.
the other slightly weird thing is that you didn't just go to a store and peruse their tapes and take one home. Instead you'd go there and pick one from a catalog and it'd be mailed to the store, so you had to go back and pick it up
if they just mailed them to the customer they would have invented proto-netflix in 1972, but nooooo, cartrivision had to do absolutely everything wrong.
anyway it's an obscure failed format from 1972, so there is very little hardware remaining out there. At any time there'll be like two tapes on ebay.
Once a tape contained a recording of a lost basketball game and it was so hard to get the video back off that the media recovery company that did it made a documentary about it and won a fucking emmy for it.pic.twitter.com/j2O9YTp6dI
and at any moment there's maybe like 1.5 working machines in the world, owned by retrovideo weirdos like me, in strange disassembled forms they're constantly having to repair and jury-rig to get working.pic.twitter.com/udIsTaDJ7T
But this auction is for a COMPLETE UNIT STILL IN THE TV, which is something I have never seen for sale, ever. This may very well be the first time it has come up for sale on ebay, and it will almost certainly be the last. https://www.ebay.com/itm/265252238312 …pic.twitter.com/1Igfp2zpK8
I have like 4-5 tapes and they are going to just shatter if you try to play them. You don't just play moisture-sensitive tapes from nearly a half century ago, they will just break and destroy the mechanism.
the mechanism which, I might add, is already broken. Have you ever tried to use a laserdisc player? They pretty much only come in two sorts now: 1. Broken 2. Repaired.
at some point there was another category, the mythical "still working" but we are way, way past that point. Rubber belts and rollers have a finite lifespan, capacitors go bad, lubricant dries up or leaks out.
This thing is older than laserdiscs by 6 years. The chances of it working are about negative infinity percent.
can it be repaired? Yeah, probably. You'd need a lot of time and money and skill with analog video electronics, but you could figure out how to get it working again.
I've already got enough projects and I don't have 1000$ to spend on this or time to go pick it up locally in Wisconsin.
so I will let some other collector get this one, for sure. But MAN am I envious. This is an amazing thing to just pop up for sale, and even though 1000$ seems like a lot, it's probably way less than this is really worth.
I would not be at all surprised if it turned out this was literally THE ONLY one of these left on the planet. Cartrivision did not sell well and it failed quickly, and left behind TVs that were massive, not to mention swiftly outdated.
You don't just keep this thing around for fun. Most of these were quickly replaced by much smaller, more functional TVs, and the Cartrivision TV consoles headed right for a junkyard.
Cartrivision is a format I've talked about many times, as I find it fascinating. It's also not one many people know about, even people who religiously watch retro-format people like Tech Moan or Technology Connections and the like.
and I think there's a very simple and sad reason why it doesn't get covered in those videos: You can't show it working.
You can get some tapes off ebay and hold one up as a prop, maybe play some demo footage someone ripped once, but the players themselves and the video the tapes store? Nope. That's not gonna happen.
LabGuy has a unit that is sometimes working. His site has some info: http://www.labguysworld.com/Museum018.htm
And there's a couple videos about it on his youtube channel:https://www.youtube.com/user/videolabguy/videos …
here's a thread where I looked through their catalog. One of the other reasons this thing failed was that their movie selection was never great. They didn't get buy-in from the studios, so it mainly was a bunch of older films or b-movies.https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1013526217301954560 …
BTW one of my favorite things about Cartrivision (and there are so many of those!) is this tape (which I own). Not only did they put the final score on the front (SPOILERS, MAN) but Cartrivision tapes maxed out at 114 minutes.pic.twitter.com/oKbNNWK1dG
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