Betamax tape production set to end March 2016.

[KarMa]

Betamax is dead, long live VHS.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9703004/sony-is-finally-killing-betamax
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/sony-finally-kills-betamax-13-years-since-it-la...made-a-player/

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Was Betamax really the better format? Why did broadcasters like Betamax more than VHS?

[poisondeathray]

Betamax is dead, long live VHS.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9703004/sony-is-finally-killing-betamax
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/sony-finally-kills-betamax-13-years-since-it-la...made-a-player/

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Was Betamax really the better format? Why did broadcasters like Betamax more than VHS?

oh woe is me!!! Time to stock up haha

(broadcasters didn't use betamax, they used betacam - big difference)

[wulf109]

The first Betacam used a betamax size cassette and betacam could use ordinary betamax tapes. Beta was superior to VHS,but Sony made fundimental marketing errors that doomed beta.

[Cornucopia]

Yes, but I'm guessing the article referred ONLY to βetamax tapes, NOT to βetacam/βetacamSP/Digiβeta/IMX or any other professional tape formulations which use the same type shell, which are (almost all) still in use.

Scott

[lingyi]

Betamax is dead, long live VHS.

Was Betamax really the better format? Why did broadcasters like Betamax more than VHS?

Betamax was/is superior to VHS in every aspect expect recording time which caused Betamax to lose the VCR wars. *SIGH*

[lingyi]

Yes, but I'm guessing the article referred ONLY to βetamax tapes, NOT to βetacam/βetacamSP/Digiβeta/IMX or any other professional tape formulations which use the same type shell, which are (almost all) still in use.

Scott

According to The Verge article you're correct. Only ED Metal and Betamax are being discontinued.

A bit of trivia. ED Metal is for ED Beta machines only and the only ED Beta camera (EDC-55) was Prosumer / pseudo-ENG.
ED Beta machines could use BetaCam tapes (I have some 30 minute Metal BetaCam tapes that run 3 hours at Beta II), but IIRC, ED Beta tapes couldn't be used in BetaCams.

@Cornucopia, I'm sure you're well aware of my little bit of trivia. It's really for those who didn't get to live through the glory days of Beta!

[mazinz]

Love my Betamax and recently had one deck restored to its former glory thanks to Mrbetamax.com, but had no idea Sony was still making tapes for it. Might buy a few for the sake of posterity, but these days I use my Beta only for transferring tapes

[Speed Daemon]

Was Betamax really the better format? Why did broadcasters like Betamax more than VHS?

One of my pet peeves is this myth, propagated mainly by poseurs, that somehow Betamax was a vastly superior tape format. It really wasn't.

Here's the story:

Around 1970, Sony introduced U-matic, the first "inexpensive" (a relative term indeed) color VCR intended for home use. Early U-matic decks came with TV tuners, just like early 1/2" decks did. It failed at that.

While U-matic failed in the home, it found widespread use in industrial video as the only color format that was inexpensive enough to supplant the monochrome EIAJ 1/2" open reel format. And in conjunction with a digital time base corrector, U-matic was nominally good enough for TV broadcasting, albeit at less than the full resolution allowed by NTSC and PAL standards. But it was cheap for business use, a lot cheaper than a 2" Quad or 1" Type C machine. Note that full-size U-matic tape cassettes had a maximum 1-hour run time.

Despite the failure of U-matic for home video, JVC continued to develop a competing product, and released what we now know as VHS as an open standard to replace EIAJ. VHS was also a color-under format, just like U-matic. While the specifications differed enough to not infringe on Sony patents, the differences were almost meaningless.

So when Sony took the same U-matic system and adapted it for 1/2" tape, this was anything but an improvement in quality. VHS and Betamax were more alike than different, with the main difference being that VHS could record for 2 hours, as Betamax still did only 1, just as U-matic did. Betamax offered nominally better specs on the test bench, and VHS could be used to record feature length movies. VHS was better because it could hold a feature length movie in one cassette.

When Sony introduced Betamax III, using the same tape cassette only at a much slower tape speed and therefore picture quality, it was VHS that had Betamax beaten in every respect. The quality of Betamax III was clearly inferior to regular VHS. Neither was even close to a nominal OTA TV signal from a direct color source.

Later on both formats would be tweaked to give slightly better performance, real and imagined. Both had SP versions using costly metal tape, and for the first time offered resolution that exceeded OTA TV broadcast standards. And once more this difference was mainly important to industrial TV users. Both cassette shells were used to house tape for completely different component video formats that briefly revolutionized the ENG world, before far more reliable digital recording swept away all analog tape formats.

In the end, Sony was the first at the gate with its color under recorders. But state of the art it was not. I will always have fond memories of the Sony BVH-2000 Type C VTR that did represent the state of the art of videotape recording back then. I will not recall the model numbers of any awesome Betamax decks because there were none.

[orsetto]

Was Betamax really the better format? Why did broadcasters like Betamax more than VHS?

One of my pet peeves is this myth, propagated mainly by poseurs, that somehow Betamax was a vastly superior tape format. It really wasn't.

Thats pretty funny, thanks for the chuckle. "Poseurs", really? "POSEURS"? You talk as if countless A/V nerds were still sitting around in cafes, irritating you with their ill-informed debates over 1/2" consumer videotape formats. I don't imagine any significant number of people are actively, aggressively promoting "Beta Is Better" as an agenda these days. So VHS needs no snide "defense" from anybody: it long ago won the war, very few consumers who were alive during Beta's heyday still remember it: for younger generations, it never existed. In broadcast circles? The story flips. Betacam steamrolled over all the (many) attempts Panasonic made to dethrone it with "MII" aka "VHS Pro" formats. Betacam was THE pro 1/2" format, both analog then digital versions: an ironic counterpoint to the failure of consumer Betamax.

The lame Beta vs VHS arguments were as silly and pointless as the Windows vs Mac arguments in the late 1980s. The truth is each format had an edge in some respects over the other, but not all: if you had any brains you evaluated the differences and used what was most suitable for your own purposes. Beta II could have superior picture quality to VHS SP, but only under certain circumstances. If your big hobby was dubbing highlights and clips, or you wanted to cut out commercials, or you wanted HiFi stereo with no interference from mistracking,, Beta II held up much better. Depending on the quality of your TV and antenna reception, Beta could sometimes edge out VHS for off-air recording as well. But you needed great reception and a great TV like a Trinitron or Proton to appreciate the difference. Most people were not that obsessive, and just went with the VHS tidal wave. Those of us who cared, and could scrounge the money, often owned both formats for a time, because VHS to VHS dubs looked like crap (until VHS PQ finally caught up with Beta around the second wave of VHS HiFi).

Sony was staggeringly stupid regarding recording capacity and likely use of a VCR by consumers: that is the number one reason Beta failed after a promising start as the first practical home video device. How the hell Sony did not comprehend a 60-minute recording capacity was laughably limited is still considered one of the most unbelievable fiascos in the history of consumer electronics. The most popular TV series of the era was "Columbo" which ran 90 mins: that alone should have given Sony a friggin clue, never mind that at least two nights per week on all three American TV networks were devoted to primetime airing of 120 minute MOVIES or sports. Sony was just inexplicably obtuse on this point from the outset, and never recovered. All the other Beta "drawbacks" that VHS fans gleefully harped on would have paled in significance if the damned thing had a sensible 120-minute primary recording mode from the get-go: Sony's lead as first out of the gate would have been almost insurmountable. But they totally blew the product of the century.

By not starting with a 120 minute Beta format, Sony allowed JVC/Matsushita to quickly overtake it as key pivot points favored rival VHS. The biggest TV brand in North America was RCA, which wanted to license a VCR but shrewdly insisted it had to have a four hour mode to record typical American football and baseball events. VHS could do this via minimal brute-force halving of the recording speed (which Panasonic implemented despite howls of protest from JVC). Sony snootily claimed they wouldn't "compromise" the PQ of Beta by devising a four-hour speed, but the truth was they just couldn't do it without major alterations. RCA went with Panasonic and 4-hour LP VHS, the rest is history. Sony eventually ate crow with a hideously slow Beta III speed that required thinner expensive tapes to reach 4 1/2 hours, but it was too little too late and created a host of backwards compatibility issues. As time passed, huge VHS sales created quicker product cycles resulting in simplified, more reliable VCRs. Dwindling sales for Beta left Sony mired in overly-fussy electromechanics that were dismally unreliable. As word spread of more frequent repair expenses for Beta, the VHS porn and VHS Hollywood movie rental stores exploded, stranding Beta as the province of early adopters and those few who cared more about dubbing/editing than timeshifting and porn.

As I steadily plow thru digitizing my humongous videotape library (3100 VHS and 280 Beta), I'm always surprised by how much better the Betas look after digitizing compared to VHS, despite my VHS decks being much more advanced than my lowly SL-HF360 Betamax. In terms of specs on paper, VHS SP and Beta II don't seem that different, but when captured to digital Beta retains more vitality while VHS inevitably disappoints. I don't regret switching entirely to VHS in 1989, because Beta was a total PITA in its waning days (the repairs were getting ridiculous, and quality control of blank tape dropouts was terrible). Beta was "better" at some things but VHS was more practical, more predictable and much less of a headache overall. My fondest memories of Beta were a couple of Sony decks themselves: nothing in VHS could match the appearance or tactile feel of the SL-5800 with auto-stack tape changer, or the incredibly sleek SL-2000 portable. VHS decks may not have reached such pinnacles of elegance, but at least they worked reliably.

R.I.P., Betamax: with a little more foresight from Sony, you could have been amazing, instead of just slightly better at a few niche tasks.

[JVRaines]

You've missed the most important detail of all: Betamax cassettes have a more aesthetically pleasing shape. At a length-to-width ratio of 1.625, they are much closer to the golden mean (~1.618) than VHS cassettes which come in at a whopping 1.816.

In all seriousness, Sony engineers have been known to pay attention to such things.

[lordsmurf]

Betamax was/is superior to VHS in every aspect

This is really just a myth.
- resolution was (almost) the same
- both had chroma noise
- both had detail smearing
- both had muffled audio
- both had physical tape defects

It was just different.

Sony's Hi8 and Video8 were "better" due to low/lack of chroma noise. But Beta isn't Hi8/Video8.

Sony has made a lot of duds over the years, and Betamax was just one of their most famous ones. Blu-ray, their most successful format, is honestly a dud as well. We all went straight from DVD to streaming. HD-DVD was physically superior, but had length/costs issues --especially given how Sony bribed everybody, and had HUGE losses in the process. And they've never recovered from it.

Betamax sucks compared to S-VHS decks with TBCs. It's the hardware, not the format, that does it. For this reason, VHS can always look better.

[wulf109]

You're leaving out SuperBeta,although SuperVHS was better. Audio improved when both formats adopted HiFi audio.

[Speed Daemon]

This is really just a myth.
- resolution was (almost) the same
- both had chroma noise
- both had detail smearing
- both had muffled audio
- both had physical tape defects

It was just different.

Quite true. There's this neo-Luddite movement that wants certain old things to be better, but the fact is that Betamax was just another product that was designed to be cheap above all else.

The whole color under scheme that relocated color information to a subband below 1 MHz was hamstrung by the fact that chroma bandwidth, and therefore chroma detail was sharply limited by that lower frequency limit (DC). No amount of tweaking could cure that fundamental flaw. Even the improved versions of VHS and Betamax that offered improved luminance bandwidth were still sorely lacking in chrominance detail. In comparison to direct color recording formats like Quadruplex and 1" Type C, there was simply no contest.

Sony's Hi8 and Video8 were "better" due to low/lack of chroma noise. But Beta isn't Hi8/Video8.

Actually the 8mm tape format retained the same inferior color under scheme as 12mm (1/2") and 3/4" standards before them. Hi8 did offer a similar improved luminance bandwidth with a more costly tape stock, and the option of PCM digital audio. But the main benefit was a smaller cassette size for the emerging amateur camcorder marketplace at the time.

Betamax sucks compared to S-VHS decks with TBCs. It's the hardware, not the format, that does it. For this reason, VHS can always look better.

I can't verify that myself, but I do know that the "U" in U-matic referred to the shape of the tape path when it loaded against the helical scan drum. All Sony-based videocassette formats including Betamax used this tape loading system that resulted in a mu-shaped (like a script "u") tape path. The quick and automatic loading was a plus for professional tape operators who needed to get playback ASAP. But for home users it usually meant more time waiting to eject a tape. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, in essence. The VHS loading mechanism drew the tape around the head drum in a pattern like a script "c", a more complex mechanism and slower tape loading to be sure. But because the tape contacted more of the drum, there was a significant overlap during the critical head-switching interval. This may account for better TBC results.

[hogger129]

I thought it had pretty much been dead since the 1980s, like 8-track tapes.

[Jag12]

I'm actually rather interested in knowing who/what was still using Betamax after the early '90s. Was there some massive backwoods population that was still using them? Hell, I'd be less surprised if Sony brought back Beta to capitalize on '80s nostalgia and/or hipsters :\

[KarMa]

Hell, I'd be less surprised if Sony brought back Beta to capitalize on '80s nostalgia and/or hipsters :\

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