Twinrecorder

In the VHS world, twinrecorders normally are understood as two VHS - VCR in one device. In the professional world there is the same understanding of twins. In the Video8 world twins are considered as a mixed VCR composed of one Video8 and one VHS drive. Both drives may be directed allone or joint (for the option of analog cuts of interesting scenes from the Video8 to be copied to the VHS tape). They were developed by the mid 90ies and this was also the last development, Sony marketed for Video8. Twin recorders offer a very comfortable analog way of cutting or duplicating videos without having to learn how to digitize or use a computer to digitize videos. That was especially attractive for the non-computerized user, as it did not cost a lot of money and was comparatively easy. Some devices even offer the audio Dub function and the insert option on VHS.

All three Sony models have the very stable and fast reacting F-drive, which was first introduced to the market just a year before with the EV-S9000. It performs very stable special video functions like still picture, slow, 2xplay etc. in both directions. The 3 different models actually represent only 2, as the difference between EV-T1 and EV-T2 lies just in the adding of an audio dub function for the T2 Model. These 2 models are highly sophisticated (which can also be seen from their price of 1650Eur slightly under the price of the EV-S9000). Rather inexpensive as compared to the T1 and T2 was the last model SLV-T2000. This is probably due to its rather simple Hi8 head drum. This makes it look rather poor especially in the special video modes (still, slow, 2xplay, etc.) as they don’t work without disturbance stripes. The playback of course is perfect and useless to say: the VHS drive of course offers all the special functions. So, after copying the video to VHS, there is a perfect still frame, slow motion, etc.