Behold the PixelVision!
It’s still in use today by film makers who like to make arty black-and-white movies with them.
In 1973-74 (I’m very clear that this was the time frame), I went to a party attended by several of my fellow radio DJs and newsmen, as well as others in the local radio market I knew of but hadn’t met till then.
One of the latter group brought a home reel-to-reel video recorder to the gathering. It was hooked up to a black-and-white camera. I don’t remember the overall unit being much larger than an audio tape recorder, though ISTR that the reels were stacked but offset from each other a bit, as opposed to side-by-side as they would be on an audio recorder.
I’m not sure if there would have been any way to get a direct audio/video feed from a TV tuner into this unit, but it did have the camera.
The reason I remember all this so clearly is that, in the course of the evening’s increasingly drunken revelry, one of my good friends decided it would be fun to be recorded as he lit one of his farts.
Sure enough, he dropped his pants, lay on his back with his ass in the air, held a lighter to the appropriate orifice, and let it rip.
The event was successfully captured on tape and played back on the attached TV. The fun part, though, was that it was possible to manipulate the reels of the recorder by hand, passing the tape over the play head manually. Thus, we were treated to multiple slow-motion replays of my friend’s singular achievement, which gave it a sort of atomic bomb effect.
This is a good a time as any to tell one of my earliest childhood memories. I was about 4 years old, so ~1982, and my stepfather brought in a huge, shiny box from Sears with great fanfare. I got super-excited upon seeing the box, with a picture of some sort of console with a corded remote. No doubt thinking it was an Atari game system, and I said how much I wanted one of those. He laughed, and said that it probably wasn’t as exciting as I had imagined…I did enjoy going to the smoky, wood-paneled video rental store, however, to pick out things like “Herbie” and “The Black Hole”, and speculated what was behind the orange-and-brown beaded curtain marked “Adults Only”, and soon after I got a Commodore Vic-20, so it was all good.
However, I don’t recall whether or not our first VCR could record TV, or merely play tapes. The first thing I remember recording was the yearly broadcast of “The Wizard of OZ,” circa 1987, with a different VCR.
I also recall well the smell of a fresh VCR tape… 
I bought my first VCR around 1984 or 1985. It cost around $550.00, which was a lot of money back then.
A lot of tape rental shops made you leave a credit card deposit of $100 or so to rent a tape, but that fell out of fashion after a while.