I think Dave needs to see the one thing i have in my office...... A Sony Umatic recorder. The original video recorder, 40 kg of steel and rubber. Scary thing is I can still get spares for it, at a ruinous price admittedly, but they are still around. Most of the tapes for it though have been scrapped though, might still be one or two that I missed in throwing them out.
Much better video and audio quality than any consumer recorder, I used these to make dubbing master tapes onto SVHS tapes for duplication. Still got the nice Panasonic recorder, SVHS, stereo, handles all VHS standards including digital audio ( needs an external big digital box to do so that I do not have, but it handles the rest) and assorted tape types and recording speeds. As a duplicator it handled Macrovision with no problems, perfect copy every time, complete with the Macrovision copy protection copied faithfully onto the blank tape. Still have the computer I used to replace the very poor original duplication controller. When you have a computer attached there are many things that software can do easily that are hard to do with a system consisting of cascaded 555 timers ( with time intervals in minutes as well, so you know how repeatable it was not) that would not work well on humid days, and which often would break down.