back to article So. Farewell then Betamax. We always liked you better than VHS anyway

Sony has finally set a date for the death of Betamax – some 40 years after it first released the ill-fated home video tech. As of March next year, the company will cease production of the last few tapes still available for the system; the EL-500B, 2L-500MHGB and 2L-750MHGB, as well as the L-25CLP cleaning tape. The …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wow

    If I was asked to guess, I would have thought they discontinued making any Betamax products around 2000. Say what you want about Sony, at least no one can argue they orphaned the format prematurely.

    1. Chika

      Re: Wow

      I would have said the same had it not for encounters with them when I worked for a short time behind the scenes at Sky TV in the early naughties. Actually it was amazing to see what TV folk used behind the scenes to produce shows back then.

      1. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: Wow

        > amazing to see what TV folk used behind the scenes to produce shows

        More likely to have been Sony U-matic than Betamax in broadcast. I was once shown a U-matic "jukebox" that could be loaded up with an entire evening's programming and left unattended.

        -A.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Wow

          Chika might've been thinking of Betcam. Better quality than U-Matic IIRC.

      2. Christian Berger

        Re: Wow

        Well Sky probably used something called BetaCAM, which uses the same tape format (at least in the small version) but a completely different tape and electronics.

        http://betacam.palsite.com/

        There's been a succession of formats with the Betacam label, they are digital and HD now of course:

        http://www.videocation.com/Sony_HDCAM_Recorder_HDW-M2000_HDW-M2100_HDW-D2000_ofr.html

        1. Peter Christy

          Re: Wow

          Actually, there were two versions of Betacam: Betacam and BetacamSP. BetacamSP used chrome tapes that were difficult to erase without professional gear, but ordinary Betacam used the same oxide tape and cassettes as Betamax, though the recorded format was completely different. The company I worked for at the time used to junk Betacam tapes as soon as they'd been archived, and I used to salvage them as they worked perfectly in my C7 Betamax (and still do, come to that!).

          There is also a "DigiBeta" format, again using the same cassette, but with different tape inside. This is still widely used in broadcasting as a high end mastering and distribution format. Servers are all very well for transmission and editing, but not so good for archiving and distribution, where tape still serves a useful purpose.......

          (I'm a former broadcast video editor......)

          1. Slx

            Re: Wow

            BetaCam is the professional and very successful cousin of BetaMax. It was/is a very robust system and it also hung on in there for much longer than you expect. It only disappeared from edit suites when HD became widespread and when laptops became powerful enough to easily handle edits cheaply. FinalCut Pro (as maligned as it is now by some) was revolutionary in the mid 00s because it was cheap, easy and highly portable. It made big inroads into news in particular in a lot of stations.

            There are still probably a few linear edit suites using Sony BetaCam systems in use in libraries and archives and even analogue systems!

            It was certainly still in widespread use in the late mid 2000s and it's absolutely still in use for library / archive purposes as many wouldn't have been converted to anything else.

            You have to remember that massive disk storage capacity was expensive not all that long ago and digital tapes are still better for long term archiving purposes in many cases as they're reliable, cheap and you don't need fast access from a server.

            Robust, high capacity storage in cameras has really only relatively recently moved from tape to solid state. Miniaturised versions of digiBeta were commonly used in professional cameras. Spinning HDDs were always too fragile and also noisy. If you shook or banged a camera (very possible in the field) you could wreck a HDD.

            So it's really only since high capacity solid state stuff arrived that's changed. It used to be fairly normal to have someone "ingesting" material from cameras and other sources into a newsroom / studio server so it could be made available for editing. There were even analogue formats in use in the mid and even late 00s in some cases, especially before channels made the switch to HD. You'd never get away with analogue now as it would look horrible jarring.

            As storage gets cheaper and cheaper a lot of this stuff is moving into data centre type setups.

            Amazing how dramatically storage media has changed though.

            I recently spoke to someone in a radio station who had never seen a minidisc and looked at me like I was talking about wax cylinders. They were still in widespread use by radio journalists the 2000s!!!

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Wow

              +1 to Minidisc

              I was still using it extensively in the early 00's for not only personal but band use too.

    2. TheVogon

      Re: Wow

      This will surely be the year of Betamax on the desktop....

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I remember some family friends around 1990, getting their son to bring some BetaMax cassettes back from the nearest big city - even then they were less widely available than VHS. I was a young'un, and it was their BetaMax deck that I first saw Dune, Aliens, The Terminator and Woody Allen's The Sleeper.

    I like that family and the their toys: Star Wars models, Sinclair Spectrum, Atari ST, Roland GM module and Casio MIDI Guitar, and later, AMD PCs, games of networked Doom, a home-built observatory... and many more technological doh-dads and concepts. That said, with them I also climbed trees, made go-karts, built dams and rope-swings across streams - so we also saw plenty of sunlight too!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can we finally settle this?

    Was it actually better than VHS or not?

    1. Mike 16

      Re: Can we finally settle this?

      It was if you wanted to avoid pre-recorded porn.

      1. Dazed and Confused

        Re: Can we finally settle this?

        Years ago I had a student on several course who worked for a company that made the pre-recorded tapes for lots of the big studios, he described the setup as having a Betamax master unit in the top of each rack connected to a farm of VHS recorders. I commented that I was surprised they didn't use U-matic or V2000 for the master, but he said that the Betamax tapes were sufficiently better than VHS that you couldn't tell the difference, which was all the matter for the manufacturing process.

      2. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

        @Mike 16 Re: Can we finally settle this?

        It was if you wanted to avoid pre-recorded porn.

        It's an urban myth that pre-recorded porn wasn't available for Betamax. e.g.

        skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3089/vhs-vs-betamax-how-influential-was-the-pornography-industry-in-the-format-war

        1. Dazed and Confused

          Re: @Mike 16 Can we finally settle this?

          Didn't the porn industry favour video/laser disk, the porn industry always knew that with a "recordable" format there would be a massive piracy problem and that in the case of porn the quality of the rip offs wouldn't deter the punters.

    2. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: Can we finally settle this?

      Technically - yes

      Financially - no

      Basically VHS have multiple suppliers and soon was the only one that rental stores (remember them?) bothered keeping much range in. The rest is obvious history...sadly for Sony, they didn't learn and tried with Minidisk and memory sticks that no other used, both were business failures really.

      1. Vic

        Re: Can we finally settle this?

        sadly for Sony, they didn't learn and tried with Minidisk and memory sticks that no other used

        I was once given the task of finding a use for MemoryStick (the TM version, not what we currently call "memory sticks"). My management were quite clear that this was MemoryStick's last gasp.

        I failed...

        Vic.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Can we finally settle this?

      Betamax was very significantly, and very visibly, better quality than VHS, not just in terms of some "obscure" tech specs sheets. In fact i was astonished that VHS took off, but apparently the porn industry then the rest of Hollycrap went for the cheap and cheerful standard....in contrast to today when everyone seems to push for higher quality standards.

      But there was a standard which was even better quality for home use than Betamax, that was the V2000 format from Philips. One quality feature I recall vividly was that if you paused the tape on playback there was no jitter unlike the other two; VHS was by far the worst for this "feature". I think Philips used something called a "floating head" which essentially kept spinning and somehow kept the frozen image static....the tech details are way beyond me though.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Can we finally settle this?

        IIRC the major problem with Betamax, at least in the early stages of "the war" is that a tape wasn't long enough for an entire film.

        1. SteveK

          Re: Can we finally settle this?

          I always thought it was the strange tape numbering system where it was the length of tape in feet (so an L750 was 3 hours 15 - thanks Wikipedia) rather than VHS's simpler 'minutes'...

        2. PaulyV

          Re: Can we finally settle this?

          Betamax not long enough? You're only thinking of the John Holmes films...

          1. a_yank_lurker

            Re: Can we finally settle this?

            Early Betamax had shorter record/play times than VHS. VHS was first with multi-hour tapes which made playing any movie fairly trivial. Also, recording several hours of TV was easier with VHS.

        3. lee harvey osmond

          Re: Can we finally settle this?

          Yes -- the supply of prerecorded material to buy or rent may have been a factor for some, but for many, the choice was between a Betamax tape that could record 60min or 120min, and a VHS tape that could record 180min.

          Although neither showed one of V2000's other tricks -- like an audio compact cassette, you could flip a cassette over and record on the other side.

          1. MJI Silver badge

            Re: Can we finally settle this?

            L750 in PAL land 195 minutes

          2. John Tserkezis

            Re: Can we finally settle this?

            "Although neither showed one of V2000's other tricks -- like an audio compact cassette, you could flip a cassette over and record on the other side."

            You can't compare them. Video is recorded in an angular manner, that is, there are spinning heads set at a fixed angle, along with the moving tape.

            Regular audio was recorded in a linear fashion (similar to the compact cassette, right over the video data, but later "HiFi" used additional audio heads on the spining video assembly to get the increased bandwidth needed for the wider frequency response. In case of Hi-Fi recordings, both old and new techniques were recorded to make the tape backward compatible with players that were non HiFi.

        4. Stevie

          Re: IIRC the major problem with Betamax

          at least in the early stages of "the war" is that a tape wasn't long enough for an entire film.

          You remember incorrectly.

          My first experience with Betamax was recording The Revenge of the Pink Panther on Christmas Day, then watching it over on Boxing Day with the family.

          Best feature? Being able to bookmark the good bits so if you were in the mood to see a bit of Clouseau vs Kato action you could cut to the chase with the touch of a button.

          1. mjflory

            Re: IIRC the major problem with Betamax

            Here in the States it's widely believed (OK, I can see Wikipedia inserting "by whom?") that the reason Betamax failed was that it couldn't record a full American football game, which rarely finishes in 90 minutes. But those 90 minutes did look better, and I used to use my Betamax for audio recording at CD quality in the days when VHS sound was awful.

          2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: IIRC the major problem with Betamax

            "You remember incorrectly."

            Well, a little Googling tells me that PAL recordings were likely long enough for most films on introduction but NTSC, the standard used in the prime markets of Japan and the USA, indicates that at normal speed the tapes were only long enough for 60 minutes. I don't recall, nor have searched deeply enough, to find out if Betamax recorders had the ability to run at 1/2 or 1/3rd speed at introduction or, if a later feature, how much later that was introduced.

      2. Mage Silver badge

        Re: V2000 Philips

        It was REALLY late to market. It eliminated guard bands by using piezo mounted heads that could dynamically wiggle. So could use a flippable tape as well no noise bars for still or slow and speeded play (which changes angle of slanted track hence noise bar on Betamax and VHS)

        Problem was they couldn't mass produce it for about 2 years after prototype demo!

        Early VHS had to completely delace from drum to F-FWD / F-REW, Betamax didn't need to. Later VHS had the "Jet Drive".

        Shame Minidisk never made it as alternate to Floppy, though a larger MO sony format was used in special 3.5" drives in 1990s (ZIP drives in comparison were rubbish). There was a Vaio with mini-disk but like net-MD player you could only transfer digital audio TO it and play, Even your own analogue recordings were not digitally readable on Net-MD or Viao due to Sony's BRAIN DEAD Entertainment division obsessing about DRM and copying. That's what destroyed MD. Artificial restrictions. Other people did make MD players.

        1. asphytxtc

          Re: V2000 Philips

          "Even your own analogue recordings were not digitally readable on Net-MD or Viao due to Sony's BRAIN DEAD Entertainment division obsessing about DRM and copying. That's what destroyed MD. Artificial restrictions. Other people did make MD players."

          This, and a million times this! I actually brought a Hi-MD NetMD enabled recorder for the sole purpose of the fact I thought I could record a whole 8 hour rave event onto 1 Hi-MD (on a single battery too) and then copy off the recording digitally straight to my PC (this was a good ten years ago mind you, before the days of cheap affordable usb recorders). The bonus of being able to add track marks between each set was just the icing on the cake.

          You can only imagine my anger at having sony's godawful software tell me I wasn't allowed to do that due to DRM restrictions! Oooohh, my blood boiled - for all of the eight sodding hours it took me to play the entire recording back over analogue and record it back onto the pc as a wav.

          Braindead? You got it in one...

          1. LesC
            Thumb Up

            Re: V2000 Philips

            I had a V2000 system from years back that used to pick up stray VHF RF from the Newcastle Metro CCTV at South Gosforth - far more entertaining than Knight Rider 2000 which was the only tape I had. The electronics in this beast were fiendishly complex.

            Betamax = Umatic this is probably why it's lived so long.

            LC

            1. Maldax

              Re: V2000 Philips

              All the schools in the UK seemed to have V2000...I think one theory was no little scrote would steal the tapes for recording The Word

              1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

                Re: V2000 Philips

                All the schools in the UK seemed to have V2000.

                After my time. I remember the Philips N1500 in my school that were occasionally used to play some BBC "schools" programmes recorded by the teacher.

              2. davidp231

                Re: V2000 Philips

                Really? The best my old school had was a Ferguson Videostar....

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: Ferguson Videostar

                  Ah yes! The suitcase-sized video player / recorder, built like a tank.

                  I had two (one badged Baird) and they were built like tanks. I ran them for years, had them serviced numerous times (until the service guy retired, in fact). Those units will be unearthed in aeons to come, to cause wonder for our successors on earth

          2. John Tserkezis

            Re: V2000 Philips

            "The bonus of being able to add track marks between each set was just the icing on the cake."

            I considered using a pc-connected MD drive, but gave up when i read about the restrictions. The stupid pricing didn't help either.

            I constructed a simple custom interface that plugs into the printer port, and then into the player headphone/remote interface, and wrote software that simulates button presses. The most work I had to do ia get the player into track name edit mode, and typed in what I wanted into the software. It sequencially pressed the buttons needed to do it, and you saved at the end. It wasn't an entirely automated solution (it was impossible with the players), but saved my sanity with taking care of the worst part of it.

            Best of all, it worked with my relatively cheap player.

        2. D@v3

          @ Mage

          I had that Vaio with the mini disc drive. you could swap it out for a "sub woofer", 3.5" floppy drive or a weight saver. Was pretty cool.

          Real shame MD never took off as a data format, before SD cards came along it was a convenient size, and had a pretty good (audio) capacity.

        3. Dazed and Confused

          Re: Sony's BRAIN DEAD Entertainment division

          All these technologies were developed by Sony before they bought the entertainments business. They'd also developed a CD writer. But to avoid the Betamax problem happening again they bought themselves into the content market, that way the could ensure that their format was used. But all these great technologies they'd developed then became an embarrassment. The planned price of the blank CDs went from about £1 each to more the cost of any CBS pre-recorded CD, so that is wasn't sensible to pirate your CDs.

          In the end it didn't help. The next format they were trying to protect was HDTV, Sony's proposed standard was 1920x1200, but instead the crappy 1920x1080 format won out. I used their HDTV monitors on a Unix workstation in around 1990, 1920x1200 and 40" :-) gorgeous.

      3. Stevie

        "floating head"

        The issue had to do with the helical nature of the recorded track.

        The best way to get around it would have been to keep the last track scanned in a frame buffer and use that for your paused still. Expensive feature though.

        1. cambsukguy

          Re: "floating head"

          I replaced my first beloved, mechanical Betamax machine with a very expensive (£650) JVC VHS machine.

          It coincided with the ending of Betamax rentals from my local rental outfit although I kept it to play movies and recordings I still had of course.

          The JVC had almost perfect freeze frame and almost invisible speed bars when FF/RW was used with video.

          Along with impressive remote control and weekly timer stuff it was very high quality for VHS.

          Of course, Betamax had the useful feature that FF/RW did not need to remove the tape from the heads prior to moving the tape, which made it faster to operate. This was mitigated for quick moves through ads etc because the VHS machine had very fast visible FF.

          All rubbish compared to TiVo when it arrived of course - those were the days!

        2. MJI Silver badge

          Re: "floating head"

          Frame buffers

          First appeared on some Panasonics and added £100 minimum to the price

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Can we finally settle this?

        "[...] V2000 format from Philips. "

        Our local TV shop liked that format. Somewhere in the 1990s they told me that all their old tapes had shed their oxide when they dug them out of storage to see how they played.

      5. Trigonoceps occipitalis

        Re: Can we finally settle this?

        "...in contrast to today when everyone seems to push for higher quality standards."

        Yes, but back when Betamax and VHS were fighting each other the final visual output, at least in the domestic market, was crap. It was even more crap for NTSC (Never Twice the Same Colour). No matter how much Betamax was technically superior the result was much the same on a plain old domestic, built down to a price, CRT TV (usually very badly set up to boot).

      6. strum

        Re: Can we finally settle this?

        Yes, Philips had better systems than VHS (usually left out of the business school versions of the 'Video Wars'). Unfortunately, their machines were forever breaking down.

        The essence of the Video Wars had nothing to do with content - that merely confirmed the winner. What made VHS the winner was that it was simple enough to license out to other manufacturers. This meant that Rumbelows could have a choice of VHS machines, plus one (expensive) Betamax and a Philips that didn't work.

    4. lee harvey osmond

      Re: Can we finally settle this?

      Once upon a time, a long long time ago, when you needed a delivery format to send your album studio masters off to the CD manufacturing plant, Betamax could well have been what you chose.

    5. MJI Silver badge

      Re: Can we finally settle this?

      Much better

      I own a SL-HF950 and a SL-F1

    6. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Re: Can we finally settle this?

      Sure.

      The best was Video 2000

      *runs away*

    7. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

      Re: Can we finally settle this?

      For image quality - absolutely. Betamax was comparable broadcast quality on a 19" TV while VHS looked smeared and had almost no color resolution.

      The opposite may true of mechanical quality. The Betamax tape path wraps almost completely around the drum head from one side, snaking through many polished pins and rollers. It would damage tapes with even the slightest misalignment and getting all those parts cleaned and calibrated for a good picture was pure magic. Players had slack sensors and multiple drive systems to regulate tension. Tracking was always fussy. Fast-forward and rewind were slow because the tape either had to unwrap and rewrap or it had to travel slowly enough to not fly off the path.

      VHS pulled the tape straight out and pushed it against part of the drum head. The reduced contact path gave VHS a lousy picture but simplified mechanics.

      Both systems needed fancy computers to convert encoded video signals that were at different resolutions between tape and TV. Early models literally had stacks of analog computer circuit boards filling those bulky boxes.

      1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

        Re: Can we finally settle this?

        Both systems needed fancy computers to convert encoded video signals that were at different resolutions between tape and TV.

        I don't remember the resolutions being different, both recorded the visible part of the 625-line picture, one strip per field, with the head switching done in the frame sync interval. The horizontal resolution was bandwidth-limited down to the equivalent of (for PAL VHS) about 240 lines, but there was no need for standards-conversion type of analogue circuitry.

        1. cambsukguy

          Re: Can we finally settle this?

          Yes, it was an analogue transfer of the scan lines to tape, with a very high head to tape speed and vertical flyback done as the head left one side of the tape edge and the other head started at the other edge (the angle was pretty small).

          A friend once told me that the most powerful computer in the world was actually in a satellite and performed standards conversion of US to UK TV, which are different frame rates, different line counts and different encodings etc. I assumed it had dedicated hardware that made it more powerful, it wasn't a MIPS thing.

          They didn't have them in VCRs although I recall boxes for sale years later that did partial or complete conversion depending on the money paid.

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