On Dec 22, 2:55*am, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:
wrote in message

...
On Dec 21, 3:34 pm, myfathersson wrote:

I got my first VCR in 1977, a Sony Betamax personal purchase half off
for only $650. When I tell you VCRs are crap, its because they are
crap They were ALWAYS crap but it was all we had so it was "good".
Picture is poor, media wears out, machine wears out, tapes get
damaged, recording time is finite. Why would anyone want such a thing
when you don't have to use it?

Here we go again...

Yes, it makes a lot more sense to record on a DVR. The consumer VCR is both
technically and practically obsolete. That said...

Unlike VHS, the Betamax represented an excellent compromise between price
and quality. The first time I saw a Betamax recording (playing on Sony's
original 19" console TV/VCR combo), I didn't know whether it was live or
recorded. I used a Betamax for years for time-shifting, and I assure you,
the machine was not "crap", and the picture was in no way "poor".

Also, those Japanese VCR manufacturers all paid licensing fees to
Ampex. They shrunk and repackaged the concept. Does that qualify
as an invention?

Yes, because the Japanese helical-scan system (invented by Hitachi, I think)
was quite different from the Ampex quadruplex [sic] system.

Helical scan tape recording was invented by RCA's Earl Masterson in
1950 (2,773,120). A good picture of the alpha wrap is shown in DC
resident Arthur W. Holt's patent 2919314, "Means for recording and/or
reproducing recorded high frequency signals," applied for in 1956. As
usual for that era, the Japanese merely copied and adapted American
inventions.

The earliest date I can find a tape recording patent assigned to
Hitachi is 1969.