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 is simply a re-orientation of the head wheel and a change
in the tape path. Take your quad head drum and tip it to almost
perpendicular to the tape path rather than parallel to it, increase
its size and you have a helical machine. Not a very big leap
conceptually. The drum is still phase locked to the video, the drum
generates a pulse recorded longitudinally as control track.
Interestingly Ampex managed to get the AVR-1 quad machine to play with
no control track and even re-generate a new control track for the
machines that required it (all the rest).

G²