The Panasonic AG-1980 - My Thoughts and Observations

so i got a new vcr

more uploads soon

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Most of the stuff I upload may or may not fall under fair use. Nothing's owned by me unless I made it myself. Uploaded for preservation and/or entertainment purposes only.

[ENunn]

i forgot to mention, i've been posting vhs openings on enunn2, check them out if you wanna see more of the vcr!

[lordsmurf]

"thingy" = tape gate. The AG-1980 is oversharp by default, so left of center sharpness slider is the true unity setting. Your AG-1980 does look out of alignment, hence the tracking issue seen. If a JVC outperforms Panasonic on EP, tracking check/verify the alignment. That left edge error has nothing to do with the TBC, that's just weird. I have never seen that from any of my 1980 decks. Your captures do show obvious signs of oversharpening, but are otherwise quite decent. Tuning down the VCR hatchet-job sharpening, and using more modern Avisynth sharpening, is really the only possible improvement I see here. Maybe some audio processing in Sound Forge (or similar) to pull out more treble, fight off the muffling. But good job.

[cynthiajumbo]

Enunn, I will always enjoy your own internet archive.☺☺❤❤

[EvanMediaArchive]

Great video, Ethan!

9:40, I've noticed the same thing too on my AG-5710 (the 1980's cousin) and it can be so annoying because in most cases I'm usually able to notice it doing that and can stop the capture and hook it up to my ES15, there's times where I go and process the tape and THEN I notice it and will have to redo the capture all over again. I noticed mine has a higher chance of doing it on SP mode recorded tapes but I did encounter some LP and SLP mode tapes with the error.

[ZEN_Ivan]

Enunn can finally beat the not having any vcr allegations

[randytate]

10:36 - the audio difference is profound. They're not even close. The Panasonic's audio kicked the crap out of JVC.

[duncanmacleod]

The edit nor detail switch has nothing to do with noise reduction. I thought the same thing then LS corrected me.

[bobsbits]

11:57 / 18:11


The Panasonic AG you need to look at the repair video's on this deck it's bad news
in the uk no one will work on vhs any more

alot of the repair lot are now picky what they fix now

[orihalcon]

Who refurbished your AG1980? I've refurbished several of them as well as SR-MV Series JVCs. Both need recapping in most cases. I definitely didn't refurbish yours since I haven't listed any of mine for sale yet.

Odds are that yours is not "fully recapped". I recently got a hold of one of Deter's refurbished units that was having a different issue that a user sent to me to repair after he refurbished it and found that exactly 6 caps were replaced on the front display board and he only replaced the SMT caps on the TBC card. Tgrantphoto also is known to only selectively replace caps as well, but I haven't personally seen one of their units to know. I typically will replace all of the SMT and through hole electrolytics on the TBC, all of those on both front boards, Head Amp, Power supply, and sometimes the 3 caps just below the video head as well as a few others. Even after doing all of that recapping, there's still probably 125 caps that don't get changed - and they dont' need to be - they usually test fine and are not in high heat areas. Almost all caps in the AG1980 are panasonic branded, but even those can fail if exposed to high ripple current or heat for long enough. If yours is one of Deter's, you'll probably see those 6 Pink jacketed Wurth Elecrtronik Caps on the front board that is easy to see if you remove that front cover assuming he's consistent in his capacitor brands. As for mine, I'll only use Japanese manufacturers (either Panasocic, Rubycon, or Nichicon purchased from Mouser to guarantee authenticity). Wurth is a German conglomerate that I believe manufactures all over Asia.

As for the SR-MV series, they almost always need their TBC, power supply, and DVD areas recapped. When they get bad enough, they'll just say "loading" indefinitely and refuse to fully turn on. Their displays also like to permanently go dim I believe due to being left in standby long enough with those caps being bad that causes some sort of permanent damage to that screen, but luckily that doesn't affect playback quality. I've seen cases of the SR-MV series where turning on the TBC made the visual quality of the output image worse (more noisy) which is an easy tipoff that the TBC needs recapping. The annoying part about recapping the TBC on the SR-MV's is that half of the caps on that TBC card are underneath of an overly soldered down metal cage which takes more time to remove without damaging something than the time it takes to actually replace the caps themselves. They used mostly crappy capacitor brands in the SR-MV series, mainly Su'scon and Lelon.

I've never personally observed the extreme left edge frame delay thing on any of my refurbished units, but that could be due to your TBC not being fully recapped maybe, or could be that I haven't run enough tapes to find one that does it. If you have a tape that does it consistently, I'd love to try it with some of my AG1980's to verify is that is something reproducible.

You might also try capturing from the AG1980 without the TBC3000 inline and see if you still don't get any dropped frames in your capture program. The AG1980's TBC is unique to where it might not need that at all in order to not drop frames and the fewer analog to digital and back conversions you do in your chain is always preferable.

[bobsbits]

hi you are very right there's a uk man on youtube i watch him he says the same thing you say
note i have alot of pro betacam decks

note alot of the gear on ebay is coming to the end of life now yes caps are a big thing
all ways changing over caps come to the end at last now

betacam decks i never had bad cap's it's easy just change over to a spare pcb i have alot of sony 75p parts
left over great for audio work have to many now

[mikelowe]

When video capturing, do you also capture line 21 closed captioning data?