Another retro gadget closely on the heels of the laser turntable we featured last week. From Sony, this is a dual VHS video and DVD recorder due to go on sale in the next few days for around $300.

I tried to get some specs for supported formats etc, but the only pages I could find were in Japanese. Luckily I have a Firefox extension with a built-in Google Translate function, but the English translation was somewhat bewildering, as you’ll see.

I have literally dozens of videos from the late 80’s and 90’s (showing my age!) but no VHS player anymore. Some of these programs are documentaries and favourite comedy collections that would cost me a fortune to buy on DVD, so I could really use one of these gadgets.

Simply load a recordable DVD, pop the video in the tongue (ask Google Translate what they mean by “tongue”) and the whole thing runs automatically.

There’s support for all the major DVD recordable formats including:

• DVD+RW (to 4x), DVD+R (to 16x),

• DVD+R DL (2 layer) (to 2.4x),

• DVD-RW (to 4x, Ver.1.1/1.2) * CPRM correspondence,

• DVD-R (to 16x, Ver.2.0/2.1) * CPRM correspondence,

and of course you can use it as an MPEG, JPEG and MP3 player.

It’s bidirectional apparently, so you can record your DVDs too, though I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do that.

Another strange thing is that Sony don’t recommend using it as a VHS player and recorder. I’m not sure if they’re trying to boost their DVD sales, but apparently there’s no support for S-VHS resolution output during playback other than when recording directly on to DVD.

Anyway, I can’t wait to find out what I used to watch a couple of decades ago….

The Sony RDR-VX35 dual VHS and DVD recorder, found via Akihabara.