Was reading the MPSIMS thread about phrases and activities that are, or will soon be, obsolete. Betamax was mentioned at least once, maybe more, and it got me to thinking.
I personally have never known anyone who actually owned a Betamax.* IMHO, it’s not so much an obsolescence as a famous mistake, like the Edsel: most people recognized the impracticality right away, so you can’t really say it’s gone out of fashion, since it was never in to begin with.
Or am I wrong? Did a lot of people really own Betamaxes?
*I’m 33. My parents bought one of the earliest VHS players. RCA, top loading, remote attached by a cord, scanning was 2X normal speed. Shoot, does RCA even exist any more?
The Betamax wasn’t like the Edsel at all. The Betamax format is actually superior to the VHS format.
The ‘problem’ was that Sony would not license the technology so they’d have a lock on the market. As a result the VHS format was designed and no one ‘owned’ it so any manufacturer could make VHS format VCRs. Economics 101 tells you the Betamax was doomed at this point. Even though it was better it wasn’t that much better. Economies of scale and competition forced the price of the VHS format down so it was considerably cheaper than the Betamax.
Lots of people did own Betamax VCRs. I remember going into (at the time) new video rental places and they carried both formats. Over time the Betamax dwindled and disappeared.
Not that I use it every day or anything; it’s in a back closet. But all my childhood-growing-up videotapes, like birthday parties and whatnot, are on those tapes, and no one has ever gotten around to transferring them. So I’ll hold on to the Betamax for a little while longer, at least until I need the closet space.
That said, I have no idea if the thing still works.
Most of the professional cameramen and video studios I’ve seen use Betamax cameras and players, although I don’t know how similar they are to the models of 20 years ago.
My husband had one when we married. We had a terrible time finding a video store that rented Beta movies. We eventually sold it and a pile of self-taped movies for about $25 in a yard sale.
I think we’ll give ourselves a DVD player this year.
Well actually I did as well. But it was only about two years ago. I had about 100 tapes much of them stuff taped off television that was literally irreplacable. But the player finally died and I had to let go.
We had one of the first video recorders on the market. Don’t remember who made it but the cassettes were about four times the size of a VHS tape and I think the tape in them was one inch instead of the narrower stuff they use today. This would have been back in about '77 or '78.
Not only did we own a Betamax, we owned the official 1984 Olympic Comemorative Betamax! I still have it in storage although I no longer have any tapes. Had a bunch which all got destroyed about eight years ago and believe you me there were some irreplacable things on those tapes. I loved our Betamax, except that several years in it developed a bad habit of displaying a diagonal interference pattern across the screen and it wasn’t ever cost-effective to fix it.
As a matter of fact, it’s not really accurate to say that Betamax dwindled - it just became an exclusively professional format, like DAT, another consumer market failure.
When we bought our first VCR, we were given crap by a few friends and family members for buying a VHS, because it was cheaper. I guess we had the last laugh.
As I recall, if you wanted a VCR, it had to be a betamax. The first year or two, that is all there was.
People who were first in technology, bought beta becuase that is all there was. Also, the beta camera was the first video camera in one piece, the VHS cameras were a camera and a bag, very cumbersome. Beta was also much beter quality than VHS.
One thing I like about my Betamax was the fact that VCR copy protection was VHS specific. That ment that you could copy VHS tapes to Beta without any decoders or the like. I don’t know how many times I had to return a video that I hadn’t had time to watch so I just copied it to Beta and watched it at my leisure.
Got a buddy who still has, and occasionally still uses, his. He worked as a teen repairing them, so the maintenance isn’t too bad for him. This being said, he’s still a tremendous freak when it comes to not letting go of old technology…
I own 10 Betamaxes. 9 work. One low-end machine is an old Toshiba 2 head mono with a wired 4 button remote. The image clarity on that machine is just absolutely startling compared to VHS. And then there are my 2 Superbetas…
Betas were selling at about the same rate as VHSs until around 1984. They were also cheaper than VHSs that had fewer features. There was no impracticality whatsoever. Some countries continued to be mostly Beta for a few more years, e.g, Indonesia and Mexico.
The Pro Betamax stuff being discussed is quite different. The tapes are formulated differently, the speed is faster (only 30-60 minutes), etc.
VHS is the mistake. As a general rule of thumb, the American consumer will always choose the crappiest tech.
The professional format is called BetaCam, not Betamax (though the tapes were interchangable). Panisonic’s first attempt to do a professional version of VHS - the M format - was so bad that they had to try again, finally producing the MII format (pronounced em-too; anyone who worked with it swore that the two Ms stood for Mickey Mouse).
Betamax was always technically superior to VHS. Then why did VHS win the battle? My guess was, VHS used a physically larger tape than did Beta; and in America, bigger is always better… (It did provide a longer run time.)
I had a Betamax until about 1990, when I reluctantly replaced it. . It still worked just fine, and I’d have been happy to keep it. Unfortunately, by 1990 (sooner, in some places) there were no longer any video stores carrying movies in that format.