Betamax

[BolianAuthor]

​

I'd just like to do a little survey, and see if anyone here who is old enough to remember or know, has ever had a Betamax player when they were younger, or remembers watching any Betamax-format movies?

I remember when Betamax came out, and we went to the Warehouse down the street to rent/buy all our movies. We didn't have a Betamax player... we had VHS, but I remember seeing the Beta tapes right alongside the VHS tapes at the stores. The two formats coexisted for a short while, until VHS eventually won out, although I'm told that Beta was actually a superior product, quality-wise. IDK if that's true or not.

So what of it... any fellow children of the 80's remember seeing or having a Betamax?

 

[T'Baio]

I had a Betamax. I owned A Nightmare On Elm Street II and some Monty Python tapes on Beta. It was a superiour product.

 

[DonIago]

My grandparents owned one and I had a whole bunch of cartoons (and came close to getting TWoK) recorded on Betamax tapes. It was depressing watching it become harder and harder to find anyplace with Betamax movies for rent.

 

[BolianAuthor]

Wow... nice! Were the TOS episodes available on Beta at the time?

 

[Locutus of Bored]

We had VHS in the house as long as I can remember, though my Dad did have a Betamax player out in his garage/man-cave. However, my elementary school had Betamax well into the era of VHS.

 

[BolianAuthor]

Nice! Well, can anyone tell me WHY Betamax was superior to VHS? I mean, if it was a better product, how come VHS won out?

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Beta was superior.

If my memory serves, whoever developed the Beta would not allow it to be manufactured by anyone else, unlike the VHS.

So, with all the competition, VHS players eventually got cheaper & cheaper while Betamax stayed fairly expensive.

It's similar to the PC-Mac thing, but Mac is actually surviving and doing well where Betamax died out.

For what it's worth, we had a Betamax machine. I have the 1985 Chicago Bears highlights tape in Beta format.

 

[BolianAuthor]

^

Oh, wow... okay, I can see how the whole manufacturing rights thing would be a factor.

 

[sojourner]

TOS came out with individual episodes on VHS.

One of the other issues with Beta, though having a superior picture and sound, it had a shorter play time which could be a problem with long movies.

 

[BolianAuthor]

^

Yeah, but I wonder if Beta had survived, and not VHS, if with time, they would have found ways to make longer-running Beta tapes, like how VHS eventually had T-120, T-160, and T-180.

 

[WillsBabe]

I remember Betamax, also the third contender for the homevideo market, Philps Super S. I need to be put out to pasture!

 

[BolianAuthor]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2v_qEVTh10[/yt]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtI8MoMC0PU&feature=related[/yt]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weWl4D4Skqc&feature=related[/yt]

 

[BolianAuthor]

Yeah, this video answers my questions about VHS versus Beta:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYQt0xi9PRM&feature=related[/yt]

I guess the porn industry delivered the final uh... blow... to Beta...

 

[Mr. B]

I'm a 20-something so I'm old enough to remember it because my Dad had a betamax VCR and a handful of movies... and of course he used it to record TV. My godfather who owns appliance stores had a betamax camcorder so some moments of my early childhood were recorded on betamax tape.

At work we still use a professional variant of betamax tape called Betacam SP. We record in digital betacam SX.

 

[Shaw]

I used Beta throughout most of the 1980s. Didn't switch until around 1988 when someone broke into our apartment and took our player (and oddly, nothing else). Because we didn't have a collection of tapes, my wife and I bought a VHS player to replace it.

I recall all the arguments about quality, but the reason we used Beta was that we were given the player by my parents. When we had to replace it, VHS players were less expensive, so that was what we got.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Wow, I actually remembered something correctly from that long ago

 

[Kelso]

Yeah, we had one for years.

Before that we had a CED player.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

One of my school friends was a Betamax owner - even when we parted company some 20 years ago I'm sure that her family was still using it. I wonder if they ever did upgrade to something more modern, like HD-DVD or something...

 

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

I am not only old enough to have had more than one I am old enough to give you a lecture on why it was a superior format to VHS and should have been the one to catch on. I finally had to give up my last one about about 7 or 8 years ago when I couldn't find someone to repair it. I sold it on ebay, still broken, and found more than one person interested in it. When people will buy something broken you know it's a good product.

 

[Jadzia]

My parents didn't have one. They got a VHS recorder just before christmas one year. It must have been late 1988 by my reckoning.

A few years later I learned that my infant school had a betamax player. That was the first time I'd heard of them. It was the only video player the school had and I remember my teacher telling us that if we wanted to take video tapes into school, they had to be the right format.

My teacher was proud to tell us that she had a betamax player at home, so she could bring in video tapes.