Sony TCV-2010 Videocorder
In 1966, under a thousand dollars bought a complete home television recorder - nine-inch monitor, reel of tape, and all.
Overview
The TCV-2010 was Sony's attempt to put video recording on a desk instead of in a broadcast facility. Sony's own advertising called it the Sony Home Videocorder and priced the basic unit at $995 complete with a 9-inch screen monitor/receiver. One manufacturer document lists the TCV-2010 at $195, which conflicts with the advertising. It was a self-contained video tape recorder with its own built-in monitor, so it didn't need a separate television to be useful. The pitch was domestic: relive a space launch, replay a ball game, catch a presidential speech, tape a program while you were out. With the optional camera outfit - tripod, microphone and cable, $350 - you could record live events of your own.
The transport is the interesting part. The rotating heads are belt-driven by a hysteresis motor, and the head assembly itself is servo controlled to hold a locked-in 30 rps speed with the correct angular orientation relative to the recorded track. That same motor drives the tape capstan through a coupling idler wheel. The capstan-mounted flywheel and the motor's self-regulating characteristics together produce smooth, unvarying 7½ ips tape movement. Tape speed is only 7½ inches per second, on tape just ½-inch wide, wound on 7-inch reels for one full hour of continuous recording. Audio (February 1966, p.40) singled that combination out as the machine's special feature when it walked through the Videocorder's operating characteristics.
That hour of recording was not cheap. A 7-inch reel of tape, a full hour's worth, cost $39.95. Contemporary coverage of the tape market noted that an hour's worth of tape for the TCV-2010 ran about $40, with DuPont's Crolyn formulation potentially costing as much as $60 for a reel of similar size. Tape cost is a big reason home videotape recording stayed a curiosity rather than a hobby in this period. The machine itself was the affordable part.
Portability was relative. In its own portable case the Videocorder weighs 66 lbs, which makes it luggable at best, though Sony's trade advertising said it travels easily from office to studio to home. The company pitched it to broadcast stations too, not as broadcast gear but as a desk-side tool: executives could keep an eye on programs and commercials without staying up late, and tapes exchanged between stations would play back on any other Videocorder. The same advertising noted the 2020 variant, in an oiled walnut cabinet with a built-in timer for taping programs in the owner's absence, at $1150, and a monitor-less deck version, the CV-2000D, at $695.
What the TCV-2010 represents is a moment when video recording was still an appliance you bought whole. The built-in 9-inch monitor meant you didn't need to involve a TV technician to adapt your set — though Sony noted one could, if you wanted to feed any monitor regardless of size. It's a machine from before the format wars, before the consumer camcorder, when "Videocorder" was still a word that needed explaining. Collectors who find one today are looking at a piece of Sony's first serious push into home video, and one of the earliest complete packages of its kind.
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