We have the 1988 version of that VCR, the SL-330. Just slightly different cosmetics. My parents bought it new in 1988, as we didn't go to VHS until 1991 (and I still recorded on my SL-100 regularly up until the late 90s, just because Beta got much better picture quality). I think the last consumer Betamax unit Sony made was as late as 1993, and the last known commercially recorded movie on Beta you could order was the Lion King. I love the Beta format and have probably about 15 or so VCRs and 3 Betamovie cameras, all of which I am restoring one by one. They are fantastic machines.
Hi Kevin, my son watches your videos a lot, everyday to be honest. My son has an unusual interest in electronics so watching you makes him happy. He loves this review of BetaMax! His name is Max Max wants to know what do you do for a living? Thanks
Betamax was around for a long time in the production world. I worked for a TV station in 2004, and companies would still send their commercials on betamax. I would convert them to MPEG2, write to a DVD-R, and drive them to the server located at our transmitter where it would be plugged into the schedule. I hated that job
+The Obsolete Geek Are you sure it was Betamax, rather than Betacam SP? As I understand, Betamax was virtually never used for production, while Betacam SP was a standard for a long time. The cassettes may be similar, but the formats are not at all cross-compatible. Betamax is recorded as composite video at 1.87 cm/s (in BI mode) while Betacam SP is recorded as component video at 10.15 cm/s. The quality of Betacam SP (and original Betacam) video is significantly greater than Betamax; good enough for use in television.
+blarrer20 Ahh, that's certainly possible. The station was a few years away from converting to HD broadcasts so everything was still standard definition. I just remember being surprised that companies still shipped cassettes instead of DVDs.
+The Obsolete Geek yes that must have been Betacam SP.. same tape size (sometimes.. as there were different tape packagings) but different format.. and yes it was the absolute standard until recently
Digital betacam was around for a very long time as well. The last hd tape for broadcast that was used for pretty much 2005+ until now was hdcam sr. Most companies have migrated over to Pro res files.
Congrats on getting your first Betamax! I got my first one in 2009 for about $50 off craigslist. came with about 40 tapes including two cleaning tapes. I still have it hooked up to the TV to this day :)
I think some 90's Beta releases were afterthoughts. The latest tape in my collection is National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon I. It's on a late-issue Sony blank; the type w/ a rectangular window across the width of the cassette's face (looks like a large 8mm). They stuck a VHS face label on it & packaged it in a VHS box.
When I was a kid, my best friend's parents had two VCRs: a VHS front-loader, and a Betamax top-loader. They would rent VHS movies from the rental store and record them onto Betamax. My friend and I spent many days and nights watching their vast collection of copied-to-Betamax movies.
I just ordered my first Betamax VCR from eBay today, and it’s a SL-2000 portable Betamax VCR with a TT-2000 tuner from 1982 along with a handful of Betamax tapes that I also ordered as of today. I can’t wait to get this thing up and running soon.
Two things wrong with this SL-390 : Capstan motor capacitors are bad (they are the surface mount ones and leak out all over the PCB). Second is the loading carriage mechanism nylon gear is cracked at the drive motor. Just superglue it . Use, and enjoy (if you still have it!). The noise in the picture is caused from the failed capacitors on the capstan motor. -Andy (the former Betamax guru)
totally! once I tried to upgrade my films to their ultimate quality, but finally realised it doesn't work this way. cheap thrills and action are best enjoyed in vhsrips.
We were a Betamax family with two models: SL-7ME (huge bulky beast) and SL-30 (which I have it next to me doing nothing since 2005, after we became a DVB-S USB DVR family). This video brought back the nice noise sounds of playback rewind record.
This VCR was from 1989, and it was one of the last of the Betamax VCR's until they discontinued by the early 1990's. Because, Sony decided to get into VHS VCR's when Sony struck a deal with JVC to produced a line of VHS VCR's. When Sony made the Betamax VCR's in 1976, JVC started the VHS format, and the VHS VCR's became popular in Japan, so RCA started the first VHS VCR's by 1977, and so did Panasonic a year later in 1978 with the Omnivision VHS VCR, and both video formats started to make competition. In addition, there was the laserdisc player which was first came to the market by 1978, and Magnavox was the first to put out laserdisc players along with pre-recorded movies on laserdiscs as MCA's DiscoVision. By the early 1980's, RCA put out the CED videodisc format, and a line of CED videodisc players, and it was a complete failure. Many of these great films were released between 1981 through 1985 when it was on CED videodisc format, and it never catch on until 1984 when RCA discontinued the CED videodisc players and the CED videodiscs by 1985.
Here in Mexico, there were still Beta tapes and movie rentals at the end of the 80s / start of the 90s... Actually, my dad bought our first VHS recorder in 1994, because until around that time, Beta started to fade out of our market... My dad still has a lot of old Beta tapes at his house... Our old Beta VCR is still around, but I highly doubt it can be repaired (I think it had a serious issue with its tape heads), because it's almost 30 years old (bought in 1987)... I hope I can find a Beta VCR in good working order, because I'd like to review those old tapes someday, and remember what they got (maybe even digitalize some of them)... :)
1. If this isn't a SuperBeta recording, you may want to turn the SuperBeta mode off. Otherwise, there could be noise in the picture. 2. You should open the cassette and check to see if the friction tabs haven't come loose and are interfering with tape travel, especially on the supply reel side. The friction tabs are clear with flat black rubber ends and are usually glued in place on the lower half of the cassette shell close to the tape reels. Over time, the glue fails to keep the tabs in place and can allow them to interfere with tape travel or, worse case, can stick to the tape and be pulled out of the cassette and onto the tape path, possibly causing damage to the video heads.
My family went the Beta route early on. Though, never went as far as the Super Betamax. Sometimes around the 80's we had gotten one of the Betamax movie cameras and ended up making quite a number of home videos. I still have the camera and it still works, as well as one or two Beta machines laying around somewhere. A few of the videos I played seem to still be in ok condition. I'm hoping to get the rest of the family's collection to see how the rest of them are. We also had a few pre-recorded movies in the mix as well.
This is the first time I've seen Betamax equipment in action. And while it may not be performing at its best...I don't see a lot of quality difference between it and VHS to be honest. I've only ever seen one Beta VCR in real life, set up with a wall mounted TV in a bedroom. Whoever used it must have been one of those diehard fans, as there were lots of tapes around. That machine looks like it hasn't clocked up a lot of runtime based on how evenly illuminated and bright the VFD is. Its back panel looks almost exactly like that of the Video 8 VCR I found (also the only one I've ever seen in person). The Video 8 VCR didn't work at all until it too had a head cleaning. Whatever ended up happening to the family in that movie, I like their choice in cars. :-) I'm surprised they only had an AM radio in the family truckster.
SuperBeta is claimed to have 290 lines of resolution, compared to around 230 to 250 lines for VHS, although the chroma resolution is about the same for both, as is the non-HiFi linear audio track. And that part of the movie is set in 1971, so an AM-only radio would be typical for that time.
Random white lines in the test recording can cause by worn head and or old tape as these tapes at least 30 years old. And cleaning the pinch roller with special cleaner ( not Alcohol) will help tracking issue if before someone didn't touch alignment edjustments.
SL-390? I have he SL-340!! :D Probably the tape was getting sticky (it can be loosened by winding and rewinding the tape over and over again), or maybe the heads were dirty or worn out... I think it's a mix of worn out video heads and a deteriorated tape... I used Betamax tapes from the beginning to... 2016, I think. Sometimes, I move to tape the series and movies I get online (I'm from Mexico), and I delete them from the hard disk of my computer after that. But my 1982 SL-2405 Beta VCR doesn't turn on anymore, and the SL-340 needs video heads (headdrum?), as the ones it has are worn out. :( I hope finding the spare parts some day...
I do remember seeing betamax movies at BlockBuster in the early 90's, but I don't remember how recent of a movie they were at that time. This unit would make for a great comparison video between betamax and VHS.
+WaybackTECH as a person that had both I can tell you that on paper Beta was better, and if you compared a 1989 Beta to a 1989 VHS the Beta would be the winner, but as time progressed and technology advanced VHS VCRs became better and better.. so a 1994 VHS VCR is not only better, but totally annihilates this 1989 Beta VCR in terms of quality that being said these are said to be cheaply made compared to their mid 80s counterparts.. so don't know how those compare.. as I had one very similar to the one in this video.
@@WaybackTECH Right. The last ones (those series from SL-300 to SL-S600) were way cheaper, and they get broken quite easier than models from early and middle 80's. The SL-2405 looks way much better inside, with a more robust circuitry, tons of adjustable screws, and a way more complex mechanism (the Sony SL-5800 has a much more mechanical mechanism, with keys instead of buttons, like an audio tape deck)... and it's heavy as hell (over 10 kg or 22 lb), despite it's even slimmer than the SL-340 or the SL-390 on this video.
Silent Night, Deadly Night. I remember that movie about the guy whose parents were killed by a guy in a Santa Claus suit and he in turn went on a killing rampage later on when his boss made him dress as Santa Clause, triggering his traumatic memories.
Ah, Betamax! Still have a very early top loading unit with nice clunky switches around here somewhere, with a box of tapes. Very cool format. The mechanism can be a major pain in the ass if it decides a tape looks tasty though.
I guess they kept releasing machines through the late 80s to keep people invested in the format as I imagine most Betamax families got into it earlier on in the format wars and by the late 80s could have more than 10 years of recordings amassed via home recordings and camcorder so upgrading, or replacing a machine with a newer model would be a reasonably low risk, known quantity to sell to. This machine looks pretty budget and by the numbers for Sony, would've made sense to do incremental upgrades to keep all the Beta devotees in a format they could dictate to completely.
i happen to have 2 sears/sanyo beta vcr's and still used them to this day love the format. i do want to find a superbeta or one with svhs on it if i ever could but never am lucky. i also have lots of beta tapes too
+rmx77 Funnily enough, "superbeta" isn't actually a rival to S-VHS even though you'd be lead to believe that since it has super in the name. ED Beta is the competitor to that. I have a standard Betamax w/ Hi-Fi and a SuperBeta machine so I'd love to get ahold of a ED Beta machine. You can find S-VHS machines semi frequently on eBay for cheap, just gotta scout it out, it's where I found mine.
It says 4 times how super this vcr is .... :D And its from the same year as me! I have a sanyo betacord, still works! But for the last 3 years haven't found any other tape to play on it.
Haven't found much of anything noteworthy at Goodwill or Salvation Army unfortunately (although I do pick up any TI calculators, radios, or computer parts/accessories I see typically)
Surprised the fluorescent display is nice and bright, a lot of these had grown rather dim over time (nature of fluorescent)! You may need to re-grease the moving parts (among other maintenance), if the grease had dried, that could also cause bad insertion / eject. Great purchase price as some of these are demanding crazy money on eBay.
I had one very similar to this one, only difference being the placement and type of controls for sharpness and tracking, mine had pots instead of sliders, probably we bought it in 1989 , but time passed slower around here so it became obsolete I guess around 1992 lol.. my brother took it with him 9 or 10 years ago to connect some equipment to a TV that didn't had AV inputs, he probably trashed it away by now.. really sad because the thing still played tapes that contained footage of me as a kid running around, and it did fairly well still, by the time he took it to his home.. I might still have the Remote somewhere. I would look for it and hand it to you but I guess you will have a better chance finding it locally than me making an international shipment of a remote.. By the way the Color slider adjusts color intensity in 3 different positions.. just as a tv would do when you adjust the "color" setting.
Betamax diehards wouldn't be buying the cheapest deck in the lineup. That was one of two models released post SuperBeta that lacked Beta Hi-Fi stereo. Check the worm gear on the right of the tape mech, the gear that drives it usually splits and causes loading problems. Also you'll likely have to replace the surface mount capacitors on the capstan's control board as they usually go bad and cause speed problems. These decks are very repair prone, but all the design flaws have workarounds. Mr. Betamax documents all of them on his site.
Kevin, while playing a tape if you hold the FF or REW down,of course you see the search on the screen and SONY calls it "Betascan"; but if you're in Fast Fwd or Rewind and hit and hold the PLAY button, the mechanism slows down a bit and the picture shows as a VERY fast picture and SONY calls it "skip-scan".I've had 2 Sony beta's, both hifi and used 1 of them as an audio deck for a while! Very high quality sound. If you can get a hifi at one of your thrift store finds you might want to experiment with audio and show us a video about it You'll see the HF designationm in the model # to know it's hifi ( e.g,. SL HF-850 )
+vwestlife The linear speed of Beta vs. VHS also helped to seal its' fate... where Beta I, II and III respectively are 40 , 20 , and 13 mm /sec, compared to VHS's SP 33.33, LP 16.67, and EP or SLP 11.11 mm/sec. But only BII (20mm) and BIII (13mm) are available for recording whereas on older VHS m/c's all 3 speeds are available for both rec. and playback. Of course later VHS m/c's only record in SP (33.33mm) and EP(11.11mm), so VHS wins the linear sound war at 13.3 mm faster than Beta at their fastest available recording speed, which is the speed that pre-recorded movies were sold at. That's why Sony had to quickly introduce hifi rather than mess around with linear stereo and Dolby NR as VHS did before introducing HiFi on their m/c's as well. I got my first Beta hifi in 1986, but unless you hooked it up to a sound system, the TV's in those days weren't sold on good sound quality, and because VHS's SP speed produced fairly good audio quality and the proliferation of many many VHS licensed brands compared to basically 3 Beta brands ( SONY, Toshiba, and Sanyo (+ it's sister brand Sears)), meant that people then started hooking up to their home theatre HiFi systems. Now they needed a HiFi VCR, but they had all these movies on VHS ( and they were mostly in HiFi too), so why bother with Beta. It's sad that IMO the better format lost.
its a last gen verson then as by the late 80's everyone was into vhs plus you can tell its a 80's machine as it has super written everywere! nice to see these not owned one but there very nice to see
What kind of capturing did you use to maintain capturing Beta/Hi8/or VHS static? My capture card stalls whenever a videotape I have gets glitchy and I record with damaged tapes as an art. :)
only seen one beta tape in my days it was when UK chairyshops sold VHS's (i think like almost 10 years ago) i picked it up it was queen live in rio only when i opened it up did i see it was not a VHS only later on did i learn what beta was, wished i'd kept it
Sometimes the picture fuzziness can mainly be from a different vcr!! That machine works, it's just the fuzziness means it's recorded on a different machine!!
I bet a VHS tape in that condition (or, with the head that dirty) wouldn't even play, but Beta is less sensitive to that sort of thing, and will play (or try to play) almost anything. Yea I bet they used a bulk eraser, but it didn't work... I imagine that since most regular bulk erasers don't even work on metal tapes, it probably wouldn't do a good job erasing a video tape. Someone probably bought that just to play their old Betamax tapes... although I remember some smaller, independent video stores renting Beta even in the mid to late '90s. Now, hopefully you find a nice pile of Beta tapes at the thrift store! They had some at the thrift store here a couple years ago but someone bought them a long time ago. If any more show up I'll let you know, and send them your way if you'd like. :-)
Yeah The same happens on analog tv's or digital tv's when The image has too much interference or The image is corrupted... The blue screen or gray screen or any color screen can be disabled in more basic, cheaper models but it can't be disabled In higher-end, more expensive models......
Did that print of Silent Night, Deadly Night have a TriStar Pictures logo intact? TriStar originally distributed the film to theaters but were forced to disown it in the aftermath of the film's controversy.
narunetto I also love TDK SA90 cassettes. The cassette is minimally designed because they sound so good: tapedeck.org/400/TDK_SA_90_071128.jpg TDK is like, "Psh, people will buy these no matter what".
I have a very similar model to this that i got from Value Village for a whopping $30, it worked great for a week until the big voltage regulator chip went phut, i it is a well known weak point with these machines, i need to get around to trying to order the new part.
Please look at the Heads at the Headdrum. You must be cleaned with Isopropanol and Paper, Look at the Rollers also and cleaned. Look at the Tapes for Mould when it was so old....Good luck! You can copy VHS Tapes with Code on Betamax and then return clearly with no Code....
i had the same problem but by slowly using it the movement became smother . it does not need belts it only have one belt with groves . better design from the belts nightmare of old Sony Betamax . you just need to wait until it solve the tape stuck issue by repeat usage after a few days of playing tapes . just wait .
You lucky son of a gun. I cant find find anything other than vhs and dvd around here. it's a dead zone for beta and laserdisc. hell I cant even find hddvd movies.
Those earlier Sony Dynamicron tapes were pure garbage. Lots of dropouts. Their ES and HG tapes were a bit better. My personal favorite was Maxell's "Epitaxial" P/I Plus L-750. Worked great with my SL-HF900 in both Beta II and III
Sony kept producing new Betamax equipment until 2002, but Beta largely disappeared from the consumer market in the late 1980s, when Sony finally began making VHS VCRs.
+northhankspin Yes because just putting in a new head would solve everything. The head works fine and it would be incredibly dumb to throw away working electronics that have a fine use.
We have the 1988 version of that VCR, the SL-330. Just slightly different cosmetics. My parents bought it new in 1988, as we didn't go to VHS until 1991 (and I still recorded on my SL-100 regularly up until the late 90s, just because Beta got much better picture quality).
I think the last consumer Betamax unit Sony made was as late as 1993, and the last known commercially recorded movie on Beta you could order was the Lion King.
I love the Beta format and have probably about 15 or so VCRs and 3 Betamovie cameras, all of which I am restoring one by one. They are fantastic machines.
Hi Kevin, my son watches your videos a lot, everyday to be honest. My son has an unusual interest in electronics so watching you makes him happy. He loves this review of BetaMax! His name is Max
Max wants to know what do you do for a living?
Thanks
Betamax was around for a long time in the production world. I worked for a TV station in 2004, and companies would still send their commercials on betamax. I would convert them to MPEG2, write to a DVD-R, and drive them to the server located at our transmitter where it would be plugged into the schedule.
I hated that job
+The Obsolete Geek Are you sure it was Betamax, rather than Betacam SP? As I understand, Betamax was virtually never used for production, while Betacam SP was a standard for a long time. The cassettes may be similar, but the formats are not at all cross-compatible. Betamax is recorded as composite video at 1.87 cm/s (in BI mode) while Betacam SP is recorded as component video at 10.15 cm/s. The quality of Betacam SP (and original Betacam) video is significantly greater than Betamax; good enough for use in television.
+blarrer20 Ahh, that's certainly possible. The station was a few years away from converting to HD broadcasts so everything was still standard definition. I just remember being surprised that companies still shipped cassettes instead of DVDs.
+The Obsolete Geek We still get infomercials on Beta(cam) in market 31. It still has a niche use.
+The Obsolete Geek yes that must have been Betacam SP.. same tape size (sometimes.. as there were different tape packagings) but different format.. and yes it was the absolute standard until recently
Digital betacam was around for a very long time as well. The last hd tape for broadcast that was used for pretty much 2005+ until now was hdcam sr. Most companies have migrated over to Pro res files.
Congrats on getting your first Betamax! I got my first one in 2009 for about $50 off craigslist. came with about 40 tapes including two cleaning tapes. I still have it hooked up to the TV to this day :)
£50? That's as much as my laptop. (Yes it runs Windows XP 40GB HHD and 1GB of ram. (987mhz and 1.87ghz also counts up to 2.6ghz I think)
there is a difference in £50 and $50....not much difference but £50 is $72 here in the states
Why is everyone into Betamax tapes and VCR's talking about "craiglist"? What's that?
I think some 90's Beta releases were afterthoughts. The latest tape in my collection is National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon I. It's on a late-issue Sony blank; the type w/ a rectangular window across the width of the cassette's face (looks like a large 8mm). They stuck a VHS face label on it & packaged it in a VHS box.
+Madness832 How is the quality? Does it look like it was recorded on a consumer model or does it look high quality?
It's really amazing that it stayed locked on the picture so well when the audio had so much wow & flutter.
When I was a kid, my best friend's parents had two VCRs: a VHS front-loader, and a Betamax top-loader. They would rent VHS movies from the rental store and record them onto Betamax. My friend and I spent many days and nights watching their vast collection of copied-to-Betamax movies.
maineboy1979 Best way to do it. Beta was immune to Macovision (anti-copy)!
@@buckfiden6227 Yes. That's why I love it. :D
I just ordered my first Betamax VCR from eBay today, and it’s a SL-2000 portable Betamax VCR with a TT-2000 tuner from 1982 along with a handful of Betamax tapes that I also ordered as of today. I can’t wait to get this thing up and running soon.
Two things wrong with this SL-390 : Capstan motor capacitors are bad (they are the surface mount ones and leak out all over the PCB). Second is the loading carriage mechanism nylon gear is cracked at the drive motor. Just superglue it . Use, and enjoy (if you still have it!). The noise in the picture is caused from the failed capacitors on the capstan motor.
-Andy (the former Betamax guru)
I kinda feel like noisy, blurry, scratched-up videotape is the best way to watch cheesy 1980's horror films.
totally! once I tried to upgrade my films to their ultimate quality, but finally realised it doesn't work this way. cheap thrills and action are best enjoyed in vhsrips.
We were a Betamax family with two models: SL-7ME (huge bulky beast) and SL-30 (which I have it next to me doing nothing since 2005, after we became a DVB-S USB DVR family). This video brought back the nice noise sounds of playback rewind record.
This VCR was from 1989, and it was one of the last of the Betamax VCR's until they discontinued by the early 1990's. Because, Sony decided to get into VHS VCR's when Sony struck a deal with JVC to produced a line of VHS VCR's. When Sony made the Betamax VCR's in 1976, JVC started the VHS format, and the VHS VCR's became popular in Japan, so RCA started the first VHS VCR's by 1977, and so did Panasonic a year later in 1978 with the Omnivision VHS VCR, and both video formats started to make competition. In addition, there was the laserdisc player which was first came to the market by 1978, and Magnavox was the first to put out laserdisc players along with pre-recorded movies on laserdiscs as MCA's DiscoVision. By the early 1980's, RCA put out the CED videodisc format, and a line of CED videodisc players, and it was a complete failure. Many of these great films were released between 1981 through 1985 when it was on CED videodisc format, and it never catch on until 1984 when RCA discontinued the CED videodisc players and the CED videodiscs by 1985.
Here in Mexico, there were still Beta tapes and movie rentals at the end of the 80s / start of the 90s... Actually, my dad bought our first VHS recorder in 1994, because until around that time, Beta started to fade out of our market...
My dad still has a lot of old Beta tapes at his house... Our old Beta VCR is still around, but I highly doubt it can be repaired (I think it had a serious issue with its tape heads), because it's almost 30 years old (bought in 1987)... I hope I can find a Beta VCR in good working order, because I'd like to review those old tapes someday, and remember what they got (maybe even digitalize some of them)... :)
Between you and tech moan I am getting the urge to drag out my old denon cassette deck and fixing the broken belt!! Lol! Keep up the fun videos!
The movie that you taped over was Silent Night Deadly Night (1984)
1. If this isn't a SuperBeta recording, you may want to turn the SuperBeta mode off. Otherwise, there could be noise in the picture.
2. You should open the cassette and check to see if the friction tabs haven't come loose and are interfering with tape travel, especially on the supply reel side. The friction tabs are clear with flat black rubber ends and are usually glued in place on the lower half of the cassette shell close to the tape reels. Over time, the glue fails to keep the tabs in place and can allow them to interfere with tape travel or, worse case, can stick to the tape and be pulled out of the cassette and onto the tape path, possibly causing damage to the video heads.
Sony still manufactures blank Betamax tapes for these recorders.
My family went the Beta route early on. Though, never went as far as the Super Betamax. Sometimes around the 80's we had gotten one of the Betamax movie cameras and ended up making quite a number of home videos. I still have the camera and it still works, as well as one or two Beta machines laying around somewhere. A few of the videos I played seem to still be in ok condition. I'm hoping to get the rest of the family's collection to see how the rest of them are. We also had a few pre-recorded movies in the mix as well.
Ooh awesome! I've got a 1983 Sanyo Betacord which needs some TLC. Interesting note about the head cleaning method, I might try it on mine.
I like how you still use tape cameras, very unique.
This is the first time I've seen Betamax equipment in action. And while it may not be performing at its best...I don't see a lot of quality difference between it and VHS to be honest. I've only ever seen one Beta VCR in real life, set up with a wall mounted TV in a bedroom. Whoever used it must have been one of those diehard fans, as there were lots of tapes around.
That machine looks like it hasn't clocked up a lot of runtime based on how evenly illuminated and bright the VFD is. Its back panel looks almost exactly like that of the Video 8 VCR I found (also the only one I've ever seen in person). The Video 8 VCR didn't work at all until it too had a head cleaning.
Whatever ended up happening to the family in that movie, I like their choice in cars. :-) I'm surprised they only had an AM radio in the family truckster.
SuperBeta is claimed to have 290 lines of resolution, compared to around 230 to 250 lines for VHS, although the chroma resolution is about the same for both, as is the non-HiFi linear audio track. And that part of the movie is set in 1971, so an AM-only radio would be typical for that time.
6:32 Helium vwestlife voice :)
@@azuresmusiccorner Despite the video quality, it has a "Agamemnon Counterpart" effect, sort of a "Creepypasta" effect to it.
Random white lines in the test recording can cause by worn head and or old tape as these tapes at least 30 years old. And cleaning the pinch roller with special cleaner ( not Alcohol) will help tracking issue if before someone didn't touch alignment edjustments.
I check EVERY thrift store I visit for Beta machines and I NEVER find them.
Great find! I didn't know that Betamax players were still being made in 1989.
The last model is from 1993. :D
SL-390? I have he SL-340!! :D
Probably the tape was getting sticky (it can be loosened by winding and rewinding the tape over and over again), or maybe the heads were dirty or worn out...
I think it's a mix of worn out video heads and a deteriorated tape...
I used Betamax tapes from the beginning to... 2016, I think. Sometimes, I move to tape the series and movies I get online (I'm from Mexico), and I delete them from the hard disk of my computer after that. But my 1982 SL-2405 Beta VCR doesn't turn on anymore, and the SL-340 needs video heads (headdrum?), as the ones it has are worn out. :(
I hope finding the spare parts some day...
I do remember seeing betamax movies at BlockBuster in the early 90's, but I don't remember how recent of a movie they were at that time. This unit would make for a great comparison video between betamax and VHS.
+WaybackTECH as a person that had both I can tell you that on paper Beta was better, and if you compared a 1989 Beta to a 1989 VHS the Beta would be the winner, but as time progressed and technology advanced VHS VCRs became better and better.. so a 1994 VHS VCR is not only better, but totally annihilates this 1989 Beta VCR in terms of quality that being said these are said to be cheaply made compared to their mid 80s counterparts.. so don't know how those compare.. as I had one very similar to the one in this video.
Ryoga2K
Now that you mention it, I remember now, also hearing those later end Beta machines were lower quality.
@@Ryoga2K We'd have to compare a Sony Betamax SL-HF1000, 2000 or 3000 (the top-tier models) with any Hi-Fi 6-head VHS unit. xD
@@WaybackTECH Right. The last ones (those series from SL-300 to SL-S600) were way cheaper, and they get broken quite easier than models from early and middle 80's. The SL-2405 looks way much better inside, with a more robust circuitry, tons of adjustable screws, and a way more complex mechanism (the Sony SL-5800 has a much more mechanical mechanism, with keys instead of buttons, like an audio tape deck)... and it's heavy as hell (over 10 kg or 22 lb), despite it's even slimmer than the SL-340 or the SL-390 on this video.
Silent Night, Deadly Night. I remember that movie about the guy whose parents were killed by a guy in a Santa Claus suit and he in turn went on a killing rampage later on when his boss made him dress as Santa Clause, triggering his traumatic memories.
Ah, Betamax! Still have a very early top loading unit with nice clunky switches around here somewhere, with a box of tapes. Very cool format. The mechanism can be a major pain in the ass if it decides a tape looks tasty though.
Can't wait to see more of this, if you ever do a semi teardown or get it working as new again..
I guess they kept releasing machines through the late 80s to keep people invested in the format as I imagine most Betamax families got into it earlier on in the format wars and by the late 80s could have more than 10 years of recordings amassed via home recordings and camcorder so upgrading, or replacing a machine with a newer model would be a reasonably low risk, known quantity to sell to. This machine looks pretty budget and by the numbers for Sony, would've made sense to do incremental upgrades to keep all the Beta devotees in a format they could dictate to completely.
The fact that SNDN is what was on the tape is awesome, heh
At least pretty soon it will be garage sale and flea market season, hopefully it picks up soon ;)
i happen to have 2 sears/sanyo beta vcr's and still used them to this day love the format. i do want to find a superbeta or one with svhs on it if i ever could but never am lucky. i also have lots of beta tapes too
+rmx77 Funnily enough, "superbeta" isn't actually a rival to S-VHS even though you'd be lead to believe that since it has super in the name. ED Beta is the competitor to that. I have a standard Betamax w/ Hi-Fi and a SuperBeta machine so I'd love to get ahold of a ED Beta machine. You can find S-VHS machines semi frequently on eBay for cheap, just gotta scout it out, it's where I found mine.
+narunetto i have 3 s-vhs vcrs but not anything in high end beta sadly. and i kinda hate mono beta units :(
It says 4 times how super this vcr is .... :D And its from the same year as me!
I have a sanyo betacord, still works! But for the last 3 years haven't found any other tape to play on it.
Haven't found much of anything noteworthy at Goodwill or Salvation Army unfortunately (although I do pick up any TI calculators, radios, or computer parts/accessories I see typically)
Damn that vent at the back is huge!
Surprised the fluorescent display is nice and bright, a lot of these had grown rather dim over time (nature of fluorescent)! You may need to re-grease the moving parts (among other maintenance), if the grease had dried, that could also cause bad insertion / eject. Great purchase price as some of these are demanding crazy money on eBay.
Someone should tell that kid Santa doesn't punish bad kids, Krampus does. nice player BTW
I had one very similar to this one, only difference being the placement and type of controls for sharpness and tracking, mine had pots instead of sliders, probably we bought it in 1989 , but time passed slower around here so it became obsolete I guess around 1992 lol.. my brother took it with him 9 or 10 years ago to connect some equipment to a TV that didn't had AV inputs, he probably trashed it away by now.. really sad because the thing still played tapes that contained footage of me as a kid running around, and it did fairly well still, by the time he took it to his home.. I might still have the Remote somewhere. I would look for it and hand it to you but I guess you will have a better chance finding it locally than me making an international shipment of a remote.. By the way the Color slider adjusts color intensity in 3 different positions.. just as a tv would do when you adjust the "color" setting.
Betamax diehards wouldn't be buying the cheapest deck in the lineup. That was one of two models released post SuperBeta that lacked Beta Hi-Fi stereo. Check the worm gear on the right of the tape mech, the gear that drives it usually splits and causes loading problems. Also you'll likely have to replace the surface mount capacitors on the capstan's control board as they usually go bad and cause speed problems. These decks are very repair prone, but all the design flaws have workarounds. Mr. Betamax documents all of them on his site.
Now I understand why mine tends to "forget" the tape speed, and tapes tend to switch randomly to B-I ultimately...
Kevin, while playing a tape if you hold the FF or REW down,of course you see the search on the screen and SONY calls it "Betascan"; but if you're in Fast Fwd or Rewind and hit and hold the PLAY button, the mechanism slows down a bit and the picture shows as a VERY fast picture and SONY calls it "skip-scan".I've had 2 Sony beta's, both hifi and used 1 of them as an audio deck for a while! Very high quality sound. If you can get a hifi at one of your thrift store finds you might want to experiment with audio and show us a video about it You'll see the HF designationm in the model # to know it's hifi ( e.g,. SL HF-850 )
Sony also implemented the scan and skip-scan features on their VHS VCRs.
+vwestlife The linear speed of Beta vs. VHS also helped to seal its' fate... where Beta I, II and III respectively are 40 , 20 , and 13 mm /sec, compared to VHS's SP 33.33, LP 16.67, and EP or SLP 11.11 mm/sec. But only BII (20mm) and BIII (13mm) are available for recording whereas on older VHS m/c's all 3 speeds are available for both rec. and playback. Of course later VHS m/c's only record in SP (33.33mm) and EP(11.11mm), so VHS wins the linear sound war at 13.3 mm faster than Beta at their fastest available recording speed, which is the speed that pre-recorded movies were sold at. That's why Sony had to quickly introduce hifi rather than mess around with linear stereo and Dolby NR as VHS did before introducing HiFi on their m/c's as well. I got my first Beta hifi in 1986, but unless you hooked it up to a sound system, the TV's in those days weren't sold on good sound quality, and because VHS's SP speed produced fairly good audio quality and the proliferation of many many VHS licensed brands compared to basically 3 Beta brands ( SONY, Toshiba, and Sanyo (+ it's sister brand Sears)), meant that people then started hooking up to their home theatre HiFi systems. Now they needed a HiFi VCR, but they had all these movies on VHS ( and they were mostly in HiFi too), so why bother with Beta. It's sad that IMO the better format lost.
its a last gen verson then as by the late 80's everyone was into vhs plus you can tell its a 80's machine as it has super written everywere!
nice to see these not owned one but there very nice to see
What kind of capturing did you use to maintain capturing Beta/Hi8/or VHS static? My capture card stalls whenever a videotape I have gets glitchy and I record with damaged tapes as an art. :)
only seen one beta tape in my days it was when UK chairyshops sold VHS's (i think like almost 10 years ago) i picked it up it was queen live in rio only when i opened it up did i see it was not a VHS only later on did i learn what beta was, wished i'd kept it
you can see its defo better than VHS tape.
como arreglo el problema en la "fuente de energía"?el "chip"negro,el que manda la energía a la placa más grande??????????
VHS Quality! What tape you use for recording your video?
Hi8
Sometimes the picture fuzziness can mainly be from a different vcr!! That machine works, it's just the fuzziness means it's recorded on a different machine!!
Did you find this on Garbage Day?
Nice quality
I bet a VHS tape in that condition (or, with the head that dirty) wouldn't even play, but Beta is less sensitive to that sort of thing, and will play (or try to play) almost anything. Yea I bet they used a bulk eraser, but it didn't work... I imagine that since most regular bulk erasers don't even work on metal tapes, it probably wouldn't do a good job erasing a video tape. Someone probably bought that just to play their old Betamax tapes... although I remember some smaller, independent video stores renting Beta even in the mid to late '90s. Now, hopefully you find a nice pile of Beta tapes at the thrift store! They had some at the thrift store here a couple years ago but someone bought them a long time ago. If any more show up I'll let you know, and send them your way if you'd like. :-)
Older VCRs (both Beta and VHS) are more tolerant of bad tapes because they don't blank the picture with a blue screen when the tracking is screwed up.
Yeah The same happens on analog tv's or digital tv's when The image has too much interference or The image is corrupted... The blue screen or gray screen or any color screen can be disabled in more basic, cheaper models but it can't be disabled In higher-end, more expensive models......
+vwestlife Yea there's that... plus a bad condition VHS tape would have speed issues, or the VCR would just stop entirely.
I wish I could walk into a thrift store and find a Beta machine for $13. In fact, I've never actually seen one in person before.
Kid: Mom, can we get a VCR?
Mom: We have a VCR at home.
VCR at home:
Well technically a Betamax deck is a VCR.
"Super Beta" Sony didn't think about how hillarious that would be in a decade.
my brother has a carrier bag full of them tapes Betamax so if you want them you will have to come to the UK for them
That 60fps tho. 👍🏼
Interesting, I never knew S Beta existed
Did that print of Silent Night, Deadly Night have a TriStar Pictures logo intact? TriStar originally distributed the film to theaters but were forced to disown it in the aftermath of the film's controversy.
It could've been a bootleg for all I know.
Okay.
Really expensive thing back than ;)
Faulty Betamax machines!
Did you ever did a video on laserdisc ?
No, but there are plenty of good videos about LaserDisc already.
Remember, the MasterBeta from Sony!.
This model doesn't have any loading belt. Try to re lubricate the gears. Nice machine and video!
I have never seen or used a Betamax is this an old upload?
No, The timestamp says 31 jan 2016
Can you get some SUPER TDK SUPER AVILYN SUPER HIGH RESOLUTION tape for it?
+Flac Or Gtfo god, the packaging for those tapes are outrageously cool looking lol
narunetto I also love TDK SA90 cassettes. The cassette is minimally designed because they sound so good: tapedeck.org/400/TDK_SA_90_071128.jpg
TDK is like, "Psh, people will buy these no matter what".
I have a very similar model to this that i got from Value Village for a whopping $30, it worked great for a week until the big voltage regulator chip went phut, i it is a well known weak point with these machines, i need to get around to trying to order the new part.
+simontay1984 The voltage amp/regulator chip in mine is an STK-5441, a Sanyo made big single in line device, my Betamax is an SL-HF 400 by the way.
what camera did you record
A Sony CCD-TRV128.
Please look at the Heads at the Headdrum. You must be cleaned with Isopropanol and Paper, Look at the Rollers also and cleaned. Look at the Tapes for Mould when it was so old....Good luck! You can copy VHS Tapes with Code on Betamax and then return clearly with no Code....
+vwestlife any chance of making any video with D-VHS format? It would be great to see. Many people don't even know the existence of Digital VHS.
No chance until I actually aquire a D-VHS VCR.
of course! :) Nice videos, i like your style. Keep up!
i had the same problem but by slowly using it the movement became smother . it does not need belts it only have one belt with groves . better design from the belts nightmare of old Sony Betamax . you just need to wait until it solve the tape stuck issue by repeat usage after a few days of playing tapes . just wait .
BTW, nice Gateway monitor! What model number is it?
It's an LCD TV set, not a monitor. It's the Gateway GTW-L13M103.
+vwestlife Oh, OK, thanks! I never knew that they made TV sets.
You lucky son of a gun. I cant find find anything other than vhs and dvd around here. it's a dead zone for beta and laserdisc. hell I cant even find hddvd movies.
Did you shoot this with a potato??
No, a Candyham.
Is this an old video? The video quality is quite poor
New video, old camcorder.
+vwestlife thank god
+vwestlife Love it!
haha that was awesome
:)
VHS in 2016?????????
Betamax in 2016!!!!!!!!
Those earlier Sony Dynamicron tapes were pure garbage. Lots of dropouts. Their ES and HG tapes were a bit better. My personal favorite was Maxell's "Epitaxial" P/I Plus L-750. Worked great with my SL-HF900 in both Beta II and III
betamax in 1989? didn't it end in 1985 ish? I'm from the uk and hardly saw any beta max stuff in the shops
Sony kept producing new Betamax equipment until 2002, but Beta largely disappeared from the consumer market in the late 1980s, when Sony finally began making VHS VCRs.
? my dad haz 20 of those lol
dirty head disk
silent night, deadly night is such a lame yet amazing christmas movie
no its not, it violates the law duh.
Lol filming with tape and u don't have to like a boss
You should rip the head out and trash it. If it doesn't have a stereo output then it's not really a dignified model.
An undignified Beta VCR is better than no Beta VCR at all.
+northhankspin Yes because just putting in a new head would solve everything. The head works fine and it would be incredibly dumb to throw away working electronics that have a fine use.
first
you paid to much for it
No offense. The camera is crap
No offense. Your comment is crap
+vwestlife Yea because it's from 1992 😡😬
Why so harsh, VW?