FORMAT: VHS     DATE: 1983 PRICE: £? [2005: £?] x x cm

This has to be the "must have" machine from the era of the separates. The deck is a fairly normal VHS portable, but attached to the side is a 4-inch colour TV screen. Handy for entertaining the kids while the rain pounds on the caravan roof, but even more useful when out shooting -- colour playback while "on location" would have been a major boon to the budding amateur cinematographer in 1983.
All the usual controls are present, plus audio dub and insert edit. The first is quite common on portable decks of this era, but insert - the ability to drop a section of new video in, without disturbing the pre-recorded sound and with clean edits at both ends - is pretty unusual. Of course, it would have been hard to set up accurate edits without frame-step in both directions, but having both dub and insert allows you to do "proper" editing.
The tape can be ejected with the power off, which is important on a battery-powered machine - a point not realised by the manufacturers of several other portables from this era... Unfortunately there is no built-in tuner, so you can't use this as a portable TV, but you can connect a standard tuner / timer unit.