Development of energy-saving VCRs

Law Concerning the Rational Use of Energy, enacted in March 1996, designates VCRs as one of the appliances subject to regulation. VCRs are classified into 4 categories and a standard energy consumption efficiency rate was set for each of them. An amendment to the law takes effect in April 1999, setting new standards. The regulation concerns only the power consumption in the `stand-by' mode as it is known from a user survey that the average user leaves VCRs in this mode for about 23 hours a day. Therefore our development effort for the energy-saving VCRs focused on curtailing the standby power consumption. Described in this paper is the development of our first such VCRs, viz. VC-ES100B (April 1998) add VC-ES10B (August 1998), which achieved 0.65 W and 0.5 W respectively.