Betamax- 80s ubercool

Kermitt

I posted this as i appear to be one of the few people in the free world left with a Betamax video recorder. The bloody thing is 19 years old- and it still works perfectly.
And what happens to your VHS player, its dead in about 4 years. If it aint broke...
I've got some classic films on it too..Batman.. Crocodile Dundee to name but two. Mainly have it for old recordings of theatre productions in my local drama group.

Does anyone else have one of these gems of the 1980's and do you have any interesting films or that? Just wondering...

aidan_dunne

We were doing a clear out of stuff last year before moving house and came across a couple of old Betamax tapes from the early 80's when we had a Betamax video recorder. One of them had the Late Late Toy Show from about 1982 or 1983 recorded on it, believe it or not. However, we threw the tapes out. The Betamax video recorder itself went many, many years ago so I don't know why those couple of tapes were kept.

It was funny to see how much smaller the Betamax tapes were compared to VHS, though.

watty

Classic example of Marketing winning over technical excellence.

The original ideas survived in professional use as the Betacam.

Philips was wildly successful with audio Compact Cassette (which destroyed the Lear Jet Audio 8 track format nnearly overnight in Europe).

They did have a semi-domestic / industrial format Video cassette LONG before VHS (Video Home System) or BetaMax. It was the 1500 series and later slightly better 1700 series. They used BIG blocky cassettes with one spool on top of the other.

So they tried to make Video version of audio Cassette, i.e. you could play both sides. It was Video 2000 format. But TWO YEARS after impressing folks with a prototype they couldn't get them off a production line! It was far too late to market so died as VHS had by that stage "killed" betamax.

V2000 used video heads mounted on piezo actuators (all other tape formats the heads are fixed on the video drum).

This meant:
1) Smaller space to guard bands, so recording at same quality on 1/4" so a 1/2" tape had two four hour sides (when VHS could only do 2 hrs!)

2) perfect picture due to moving heads up/down as drum rotated to fine tune tracking and aviod geometery / noise bar in pause, slowmotion and fast preview/cue

3) Almost impossible to mass produce the video drums!


Though Epson is now famous for its higher end inkjets using piezo technology, their original model was a disaster and they went back to design lab for a few years before launching the technology a second time. All other inkjets use alcohol gas bubble in a heated tube. Epson squeeze out and flick the droplets using piezo actuators (this is why ink refils of Epson are a bad, bad idea, replacing that built in piezo head is seriously expensive).

Philips obsessed with compact cassette success (they get a small royalty on every recorded or blank cassette), tried again with Digital Audio.

They managed to fit a helical VCR type drum into a cassette recorder that could play linear analog cassette tapes or Digital Audio. It was a failure because only professionals not public bought Digital Tape, and the professionals adopted the slightly superior single sided DAT format that is now mostly only used for Computer DDS backup drives.

Digital Camcorder "miniDV" is essentially a slightly shrunk version of DAT format.

telecinesk

That jpg looks like a Sanyo thingymax..Yeah, I have had 3 of them since 1985. Im down to my last one, its a portable (laugh) one, it has the Sony C9 head drum so will last a lot longer than my previous heaps which I wore out.
Ive loads of CH4 The Tube progs and all sorts of weird 1980s stuff.(Porn too!) Adding to it, I used it last year as my VHS had DIED! Its is true, VHS sucks alright..
Had a 1/2inch bw reel to reel too, heads went finally. A skip in DunLaoghaire received it willingly..
Beta Rocks!

Len_007

Yeah we had one at home. Alls I had were Loony Tune cartoons for it. I remember being peeved coz we couldn't rent videos from the local X-tra Vision (then "Flix") as they were all VHS.