[George Cooper]

Just to add to any confusion out there with VCR, VTR etc may I point out that there is also the VCR, Video Cartridge Recorder, Panasonic made loads of them for the semi pro market (Education), NV-5120 and similar for those who might like to check then out. Another American company also made a cartridge recorder I.V.C (International Video Corporation).

The cartridge operated with a stiff leader tape which self threaded itself onto a spool built into the machine, the Panasonic version worked very well and I worked with many. The I.V.C. Machine was dreadful and broke more often than it worked from what I recall, we had a few in on demo but we decided in a few days that they were not worth bothering about. The I.V.C. Machine preceded the Panasonic machine by a good few years so perhaps Panasonic sorted out the problems.

With both machines the cartridge tape could be removed from the cartridge housing and played on an open reel machine (or vice versa), I.V.C. had there own format (which on open reel produced near broadcast results from it's 1” tape. The Panasonic version was slightly better than VHS and conformed to the EIAJ format which means that it could be played on many different makes if it was an EIAJ format.

The big disadvantage of the cartridge format was that you had to fully rewind the tape to remove it from the machine, the big advantage of the cartridge format was that you had to fully rewind the tape to remove it from the machine, which meant that it was ready to play the next time. In education this was so useful as with cassette formats no one rewound the tape ready for the next time.

There may be others but these are the only ones I ever worked with. I do recall that Hitachi had a cartridge machine but it was (I think) a Panasonic.