Overview
The 2020 was the very first V2000 VCR to be sold in the UK. By todays standard the VCR still appears to look high-tech despite its large size ( 54cm x 36.5cm x 15.2cm ) and its great weight ( 17.5kg ). One reason for its great mass was the two large AC mains motor which were used for the tape transport.
Like all V2000 VCR's this model used Dynamic Track following which
meant that there was no external tracking control. The tracking was
performed electronically and the video heads followed the correct path
guided by the action of the piezo-electric crystals they were mounted
on.
The VCR did not have picture search or picture still modes but did feature a goto function which enabled the any part of a recorded tape to be easily located by means of key-pad mounted on the front panel. The key-pad was also used for timer/clock setting and was easy to use avoiding fiddly clock up/down buttons as found on other format VCRs.
Along side the tape counter/clock display was the channel display which indicated which of the 99 internal preset channels was tuned at any time. Most V2000 models were aimed at the European model and therefore had VHF/UHF multi-band tuners.
Another feature available on the front panel was an auto-rewind function which when enabled would cause any tape to rewind when the end was reached. This was extremely useful if the VCR was left in record mode.
Despite being huge, heavy and primitive, the VR2020 has an unmistakable charm of its own. It can rewind a tape in no time at all, yet somehow go from running at a thousand miles an hour to dead stop with just a satisfying "dink" from the mechanism.
The V2000 picture quality is not always what could be hoped for. It's OK, but seems to suffer from the same slightly noisy vertical edges that VHS does.
Thanks go to Colin McCormick for some of the description.