The Betamax VCR: 1975-2002

"(August 28, 2002) Tokyo -- Sony Corp. has announced that it will make only 2,000 more consumer Betamax videotape recorders before discontinuing its 27-year old format later this year...

The company listed new digital recording formats as the official killer of Beta, stating that the likes of recordable DVD have precipitated a final decline in demand, making it "difficult to secure parts" for Betamax machines...

Sony reported shipments of 2,800 machines in its 2001 fiscal year, which ended in March; the total number of recorders produced over the format's lifetime will top 18 million..."

Link to full story:
http://www.medialinenews.com/issues/2002/august/news0828_3.shtml

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
e-mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

After all, you can still buy turntables for playing LPs and 78s, decades after those formats went out of widespread use.

The transition took about a year before all the record stores up in this area discontinued stocking the black vinyl analog disk. Good quality turntables are very expensive today, although they still can be obtained. They are practially a specialty item.

I have VHS tapes that are 20 years old that still play well, and tapes that are 20 years old that won't play well at all. The correlation? Scotch/3M tapes have held up, others have not. Also the tapes at SP speed play much better than the SLP/EP speed (which is obvious as to the reason why). Fortunately for me 99% of my tape collection is on 3M stock and most of it plays fine. However my early HiFi recordings do seem to have "issues". The tapes I made on my Panasonic PV-1730 machines at SP still track perfectly, but HiFi tapes made on any other machine are littered with noise in the audio.

Bottom line: buy quality equipment and quality tapes if you want your recordings to last.

Paul & Thomas: Retail sales of prerecorded VHS tapes are dropping here, too. But I still believe that VHS as a format will take a lot longer to become totally obsolete than any previous consumer audio or video format, simply because of the huge amount of software already out there. Perhaps a better comparison than vinyl/shellac would be audio cassettes. Despite the growth of recordable CD technology sales of both hardware and software are still strong. Recordable DVD technology will also have to deal with certain issues before it gains widespread market acceptance. Many people who aren't technically minded find the concept of a medium which you can only record on once and then the recording is 'set in stone' to be too complicated for their liking. On CD-RWs the slightest scratch can make the disc unplayable, and I'm sure similar issues relate to DVD-RWs. People have got used to tapes as a linear format (i.e. you have to rewind them) and can deal with that. Optical discs work differently. There is a culture change that needs to happen as well as a technological one before VHS gets totally sidelined.

I presume they were getting confused between BetaMAX and BetaCAM.

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Of course, 35mm camera stock, print stock, and lab services will likely be available long after VHS is dead and buried.

Brad--sadly, 3M hasn't been in the magnetic tape/disk business since the mid-'90s....

Anyone operated a 2 inch VTR machine ? I did once at training school, the spools weighed a ton. I rather liked the 1” open reel VTs, to me they were a joy to operate with all the logics.

The physical cassettes were identical to Betacam, Betacam SP and Digibeta cassettes of the smaller of the two sizes (i.e. the ones which hold up to 30 minutes on a PAL Beta SP). However, the tape ran a lot more slowly, with the result that you can get a lot more running time on each tape.

I still have a Sony Betamax VCR. A friend in a regional TV studio gave me a consignment of about 150 Betacam (not SP) 30-minute blanks when they upgraded to SP and would otherwise have put the tapes in a skip. On a 30 minute Betacam tape you can record 3 hours 15 minutes of Betamax. I still get the machine out every now and again, to transfer material recorded on it to MPEG - usually irreplacable stuff recorded off-air.

Played through a Trinitron monitor, I'd say from just looking at it that the picture quality is almost as good as S-VHS - certainly much better than normal composite VHS.

We have around 300 reels of 1" C format in our collection, but, thank goodness, no 2" quadruplex. The BBC central archives in Brentford have, I am told, over 30,000 reels of 2".

You can still get records of pretty much anything, you just have to order. When I was in Germany in '92, their record collection at their music stores was bigger than their tape and CD collection combined, and this was not a specialty music store (okay, I'll give you that it was 10 years ago). The reason the vinyl industry has survived and, like Leo said, you can get turntables still, is because of the hard core audiophiles that believe records sound better than CD's. Nobody likes tapes better, so they're almost dead. Nobody likes VHS better than DVD, so they'll die within 5 years too. DVD players are getting so cheap, you can't build a VCR cheap enough to make people want them. Tivo and PVR's are slowly overtaking the home-recording market.

The interesting thing is, if Sony hadn't been so selfish with Beta, VHS would of lost that war, and everyone would have had Beta in their living room rather than VHS.