Who was the market for the JVC CR-6x00U?

[ARC Tech-109]

I don't think any of the JVC or Panasonic 3/4 decks were ever high band, this might have been a Sony only thing as I believe Panasonic exited the U-Matic arena after the AU-A series and JVC sometime in the later part of the 80's with the CR-800 series front loaders. I know high band originated somewhere in the mid-70s on some of the broadcast decks with the BVU designation but have never seen any in the wild. The only one I remember in the portable arena was the BVU-150 and that was an SP variant, I used this with a DXC-M3a for several years and while it did a spectacular job of recording SP on tape they didn't do so well on low band equipment, highlights would sometimes clip at the edges.
I've only worked with the Panasonic AU U-Matic once at a technical college so I can't give much of a review or opinion other than I remember it being very well built. The JVC CR-8000 series was a frequent guest on my service bench in my early years and the list of issues with these is best detailed in another post. The CR-800 was about the same as the Sony VO-7000 series editors but seemed a bit more user friendly.

I think what you were referring to in the early digital arena was the 1125 line HDVS Sony HDD-1000 from the mid-80's maybe someone can nail down the year here. It was based on the Type-C format and ran the tape at double the speed and had an outboard digital processor but that's about all I know about it. One of our local stations had one in an OB van and I remember seeing it in operation during the time I was doing generator service for Onan in the 1980s. It took enough energy on its own to make a 6500 watt Onan Emerald generator grunt.

Stupid useless history.
Going back to my first U-matic that was a Sony VO-2600 I picked up for $20.00 at a 3M surplus store in St. Paul one rainy early autumn Saturday afternoon in 1984. It was marked as/is and plugged in would only show AUTO OFF. My school had a number of Sony VP-2000 players bolted to these rolling carts with either Setchell Carlson "Educator" or RCA Lyceum metal sets perched on the top. So the next day in school I carefully observed one of the VO-2600 decks in action in the media center and noticed there was a small light similar to our Panasonic top loader to sense the tape, after school I lifted the top of mine and saw the same light with a broken filament. Where I lived our nearest RadShack was the Hub Shopping Center and I was on my bike making my way in the rain to pick up some small wired light bulbs having no idea what the voltage was. I had an idea they were 12V so that's what I got and after my chores I carefully threaded in the new lamp and hit the power button. No AUTO OFF light! The deck had a tape stuck in it and having no idea what it was I hit play anyway and it threaded up. YAY!! It worked!

Brett Lee wants his MTV...
We didn't have cable but my neighbor next door did so I made a deal with him to mow the grass, shovel snow if I could tap his A-side cable, in those days Rogers Cable had an A/B cable system and MTV was on channel 28. I found a generic cable box at a flea market for $10 with a video out and already knowing Rogers was transmitting MTV on the FM band in stereo I used the tape in/out of my 800B stereo receiver and over that winter had amassed over 50 hours of MTV videos... seemed like the cool thing to do in those days. I was involved with the school media center anyway at this time and was allowed to take two tapes a week for keeping things in order.
40 years later most of the tapes I made survive to this day, only a few have either become sticky or have otherwise failed in some way that I don't recall. No they're not perfect quality by today's standards but good enough to be equal to what we had in the moment. Unfortunately the 800B was effectively and not so lovingly destroyed by my kid brother who took it upon himself to melt a dozen or so crayons on the 7591 tubes, it didn't have cabinet. Forgiven but not forgotten. I still have one of those 7591s and EM84 from the 800B floating around.