Tag Archives: VCR

Geek-Speak

Hunting Dinosaurs

Have you tried to buy a VCR lately? You’d think I was hunting up some dinosaur matter to create my own Jurassic Park. Wally World, Sam’s, Target, Best Buy…. no dice. Amazon has a few — a few — but it seems like most of them are through third parties, and I’m more than a little leary about buying something like that from some guy selling out of his garage through Amazon.

What’s the deal? There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of home video tapes out there that needs to be converted to digital media of some kind. Without a source player, those old VHS tapes might as well be fodder for skeet shooters… or 160KB 5¼” diskettes. With the recent demise of both of my VHS monsters, I’m left with about 40-odd tapes that I’d like to convert to digital media, and preserve off to something a bit more future proof and less prone to magnetic manglement.

I’ll get there, but I thought I should future-proof my plight, lest some wary reader sometime next week see this, and wonder how us cavemen got along.

Photography

Macro Playground

Last weekend, I had planned to continue working on converting some old VHS tapes to digital media, sucking them into Doc Oc. However, a couple of tapes later, I found that both my VCRs had become crusty from lack of use. One even had gained a taste for tape eating.

As punishment to them both, I dissected them. 🙂

Two days of dissection left me with two VCRs with the mechanical parts separated from their planars, and loads of things to photograph with my Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens. I won’t bore you with all the details on every discovery on the parts — there was nothing earth-shattering — but I definitely had a ball photographing this treasure trove of small electronic parts and gears.

Although I photographed many different types of small parts, my favorite images were those where I was capturing the different colors on resistors, some kinds of capacitors and glass diodes. I also dissected a DVD drive from one of the units, and got to play with the laser’s lens, which was a gorgeous color of blue.

My least favorite items? Well, surface mount stuff wasn’t as amazing as I was expecting. It was cool to capture things that small, but there wasn’t much beauty to them — little black boxes with printing atop. Give me regular ol’ circuit board components. They’re colorful, big enough to make for good lighting, and they create some neat images, especially in moderate density clusters.

Take a look at the clusters of photos below, and let me know what you think.