William Sommerwerck wrote:

I never did a side by side comparison between VHS and Beta,
so I can't really be sure that Beta is really better. As I recall,
I didn't see much difference.

I hope the following doesn't sound unduly ad hominem. However, the differences
are plain.

1 Betamax has more-stable tape motion. Without TBC, VHS has enough jitter to
produce a sometime-ragged-looking picture.

2 Betamax appears to have slightly better luminance /and/ chroma bandwidth.

3 Sony's refusal to license its polarity-inversion chrominance-recording
system forced JVC to use a quadrature system, which badly degraded color
fidelity.

If you want conclusive proof, look for an article in one of the video mags
(sorry, I don't remember which or when) where a source was repeatedly dubbed.
Betamax held up for three or four dubs. VHS fell apart very quickly.

Betamax represents a "reasonable" compromise for a consumer product. I
consider myself a critical viewer, but I could watch Beta tapes without
getting unduly upset. VHS was another matter.


You do know that Ampex started the development of VHS before they
sold out to a consortium of japanese companies to raise much needed
funds for their financial survival? Ampex wanted to make a cheap,
scaled down version of their existing 1% 2" tape systems, to sell at an
affordable price for consumers but ran into cash flow problems.

Sears and a couple others attempted to develop and market
Cartrivision, another failed system. The cartridge was huge, and rental
tapes couldn't be rewound. They had to be put in a separate machine at
the video store to be rewound before being rented again. That made them
so unwieldy that no one want ed to handle them. Only blanks could be
recorded, & played, after being rewound on a home machine. Avco was the
company doing the development, at the site of a former W.W.II Crosley
plant on Glendale-Milford Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. The testbeds were
still sitting in the warehouse when it became the original location for
Cincinnati Electronics.

The Betamax machines I worked on treated the tape a lot worse than
VHS. Some had the tape sliding against itself to simplify they loading
and unloading.

Having seen both in use in a broadcast station, the cheap VHS was
much better than any beta, other than the overpriced ENG version that
only got 20 minutes per tape. All Sony machines needed a TBC to meet
FCC requirements, but I could feed a $79 VHS tape into our Vital
Industries Squeezezoom and get a picture that was stable enough to
broadcast.

We had a complete three deck 1" sony video editing suite, each with a
TBC. The LaCarte video automation system had 12 sony U-matic players
and a 'Striper' to record programs and read the time codes for the
automation. That system had another TBC. We used a framestore to
synchronize live video from the studio, rather than depend on not losing
the feed over the 7 GHz STL. At times we used a second framestore to be
able to crossfade between live feeds from two studios, in different
cities.