V-Cord

~ the obituary ~

Sanyo introduced V-Cord in 1972, three years ahead of Betamax and four ahead of VHS. The date is not perfectly firm. Format historians put the introduction at 1972 and Wikipedia's infobox says 1974, and the earlier figure is used here because the specialist catalogs are more careful with formats than the general ones are. Either way, Sanyo was early.

The cassette held half-inch tape, the same width Sony and JVC would settle on, and the first machines recorded in black and white only. A V-Cord I cassette ran twenty or thirty minutes. The decks could not rewind on their own, so you needed a separate rewinder sitting next to the recorder, which tells you how early in the history of this object we are standing.

Sanyo sold it for home movies. Toshiba built machines for the format as well, and a second manufacturer signing up is normally the signal that a format has a future in front of it.

~ the case file ~

~ the second try ~

V-Cord II arrived in 1976 and was a serious piece of engineering. It recorded in color, and it was the first consumer video recorder sold anywhere with a choice of tape speed: standard at 2.91 inches per second, long play at 1.45. On a V-120 cassette wound with thinner tape, long play bought you two hours. Resolution ran around 250 lines in color and 300 in black and white.

Two hours is the number that mattered, because two hours is a feature film or a ball game. The entire public argument between Betamax and VHS a year later was fought on exactly this ground, over how much of an evening a single cassette could hold. Betamax launched in 1975 with one speed and one hour. VHS launched in 1976 with more. V-Cord II shipped the same year as VHS with the answer already built in.

~ the name that survived ~

By 1977 Sanyo had stopped fighting. It joined the Betamax camp and began selling Sony's format under its own badge, and the badge it picked was Betacord, which kept the second half of V-Cord bolted to the front panel of a machine that shared nothing with it. The company did well out of Beta for a while and shipped SuperBeta and Beta Hi-Fi models through the early eighties.

Then around 1984 Sanyo moved its production over to VHS, because Beta was losing too. Having the right feature first turned out to be worth nothing twice in a row.

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