"Bruce Esquibel" wrote in message
...
Ian Field wrote:

The old favourite was the sensor bulb blown - its a thin vertical post in
the middle of the deck that pokes up a hole in the bottom of the
cassette.

Later models used an IR LED - AFAIK: these never caused problems, so
might
be a belt job as others have suggested.


Yeah but realistically, only the 1st/2nd generations of vhs decks used
those
incandescent light bulbs, the machine would have to be from the late 70's,
early 80's.

I always figured it was a safety feature, a stupid one, where if the bulb
burned out, the machine wouldn't power on. The only logic behind it was if
the bulb did fail, there would be a possibility of snapping the tape on ff
or rew when it hit the end and threw the machine in the stop mode. No
bulb,
no stop at the end of the tape.

Remember the dew sensor?

The early machines had some kind of peice of ceramic with a coil like
thing
on it. If it thought there was too much humidity around the video head
area,
it wouldn't let the machine power up either, but at least there was a
"dew"
light, usually yellow saying why.

Last VCR I returned either didn't have a dew sensor, or it didn't work.

It was a sony and the LP function didn't work on the longer tapes, just as I
returned it to the store I remembered I'd left a tape in it. The suggestion
to plug it in and hit eject resulted in a tightly bound head drum.

Having been carried outdoors then taken into a busy store with lots of
humidity, it developed an abundance of condensation.

On the bright side - I didn't have any difficulty persuading the store it
was defective.