Now actually ON topic.

Beta always was better than VHS. Even with all the advancement over the years, Beta stepped ahead. When SVHS used metal tape and upped the video carrier to 7 Mhz, Sony upped theirs to 8.6. An ED Beta recording is indiscernable from the original in NTSC, no matter how fgood a reciever you use, with digital COMB, wide I demod and allt that ****, you are very unlikely to percieve it, unless you know how to look for the effects of the COMB filter. Even then it isn't all that easy.

That is one thing about both formats. Because of the nature of color under recording, they never upped the carrier frequency for that. They couldn't because the tapes would no longer be compatible, actually they wouldn't be anyway but the "retooling" was probably too expensive.