Porn was widely available on Beta and in fact, appeared first on Beta since Beta was on the market for almost a year and a half before VHS. It wasn't until the mid-1980's that all companies started cutting back on their Beta releases. VHS won the battle because RCA put its advertising muscle behind it and sold the units for only slightly more than they were paying for them from Matsushita. Their original ad slogan, "4 Hours, $1000, SelectaVision" drove VHS sales right from the start.
Not so fast. Betamax tapes were limited to only an hour, so every movie required multiple tapes; playback ergonomics is a factor. Betamax was also more expensive and had a heavier player (36 lbs).
***** True. Both Betamax and VHS had options to slow down tapes for longer playback times, but there's some contention over how much these methods affected quality. As an aside, I'm so happy that this is in the past now. I have Lawrence of Arabia in HD on my phone. I can seamlessly watch from start to finish and easily switch to anywhere in the film. Also, surround sound is a happy bonus.
@texasgungeek I definately agree. I have VHS tapes recorded in 2006 and 2007 that are unwatchable, but I see Betamax tapes recorded 35 years ago that look as if they were just recorded.
Sony consistently has been putting out better formats for AV. It's too bad they lost this one. However, Blu-ray was a success and even though it was initially more expensive than DVD and HD-DVD, it's now of equal cost and of much better quality. The discs hold more content, are harder to scratch, and forced the industry to evolve. Congrats, Sony!
You forget that you can't play them unless you have a player wired into the internet to do DRM rights scanning and forced update checking. So Blu-Ray can fuck off.
MrWolfSnack What are you talking about you don't need a internet connection to play Blu-Ray movies? You can play them all offline on PS4/PS3 and regular Blu-Ray players.
I wish I could agree. Blu Ray was handled so awful when it came out. Most encodes where shit upscales and still in mpeg2. HD DVD was using VC-1 from theget go and had a much better initial track record for picture quality. Blu ray did win out and the disk are better now but, Sony wasted tons of money winning a format war that didnt matter. DVD sales still account for a huge amount of movie saves and blu ray never really took over the market like they wanted. It makes up around only 40% of movie sales. The isssue is neither Sony nor Toshiba forced dvd out of the market. They should have used HD DVD with DVD on one side of the disk and HD on the other and not offered another version at all. If you don't force customers to buy into the better format they wont. Look how long VHS lasted when laserdisc had been around since the 70s. Picture and audio quality is normally the least important feature to the average joe blow.
This is apples & oranges. It clearly says "SuperBeta", which is a high band format not compatible with Betamax, similar to S-VHS being the incompatible high band version of VHS. Of course a high band format will be superior to a vanilla VHS, but that is not a fair comparison. A fair comparison would be vanilla Betamax vs vanilla VHS, or SuperBeta vs S-VHS. Bet you'd not notice much difference with either. The thing is, all consumer video formats of the 1970s and early 80s compromised heavily on picture quality - basically throwing away half of the resolution of a broadcast quality TV signal plus some other "dirty" tricks - in order to be able to make VCRs affordable to consumers at all. VHS, Betamax the original Video8 and the European Video2000 (which most North Americans here won't have heard of) do this. Only when mid 1980s technology hand advanced enough, did it become possible to sell near-broadcast quality VCRs at affordable prices to consumers, but it did involve breaking compatibilty. This is how the then new formats SuperBeta (later ED Beta), S-VHS and Hi8 came about. And of course they're bound superior to any of the formats of the previous generation.
Super Beta was +20% sharpness. 250 to 290 Horizontal lines. SUPER VHS = ED BETA, 400/500 horizontal lines. Tapes super beta can played in normal beta deck, but with sobremodulation.
I remember seeing this material back then. Super beta almost looked better than 3/4" (though the 3/4 had much less video noise). The head switching artifact is common to all 2-head helical scan machines, even 3/4" (except the broadcast designed BVU series of 3/4 decks that moved the playback head switch down to the first line of vertical sync). The head switch was placed 6 lines above the V sync in consumer machines to retain stable vertical sync under non-optimum conditions.
The average consumer couldn't discern any marked difference between the two so it came down to amrketing and price. At this juncture of home entertainment people simply were excited about being able to watch movies, tv shows, and yes, porn at home anytime they wished. It was also a revelation to have the ability to record something om these new formats . They didn't care much about slight differences in color saturation or resolution . Sony went about it the wrong way....
To be honest, even the VHS isn't too bad. The only issue is after recording over them, yeah, after the 2nd recording, they look like crap. However, it's also important to look at it this way... Remember, these were first recorded, then re-recorded and dubbed over, and then converted to digital, as... Well, it's on UA-cam now. AND, youtube compresses it even further... So that's about 4 stages of lossy formatting/compression to mess with the quality of these tapes. It's 7 on the 3rd gen copies shown in the video... However, I do have to give it to the Beta tapes, even after all that, they really fared quite well. Actually, why I'm even looking this up, is because I've got a lot of VHS tapes from when I was a kid, of so many different movies and shows. Likewise, my grandma literally must have had 2000 vhs tapes. Probably about 1000 for my mom. Lots of stuff, and lots of watching time in those tapes. ...And to be honest, I can at times, be a snob about video quality, but I broke out a couple of those VHS tapes, and even after all these years, they're totally decent quality! However, most of those were ruined in Hurricane Sandy. I'm from New York. But going back to quality, this is coming from someone with a $1200 gaming/video editing PC who is able to play pretty much everything at max settings, 60+fps, as well as watching Blu-Ray movies on that same machine. I think part of it is nostalgia, though. Kind of like people who go and buy classic game consoles like NES, or heck, Atari 2600. Actually, that's a worse example, because the gap between the 2600 and current games... And VHS to Blu-Ray is not NEARLY as great. But what I mean is, while those older formats and technologies may be old, that doesn't make them bad. I think people need to stop being so superficial and appreciate how things were back then! Yes, I'm lucky enough to be able to get a great gaming PC, but I chose that over updating the rest of the TV's in my house. And even for that, to afford these things (just about) makes me thankful. I won't lie, I had to save up for quite a while for that build... Anyway, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to enjoy the classic stuff. While the vast majority in America, even some people who are quite poor, can afford much better and much newer technology, that CERTAINLY shouldn't stop us from appreciating the old!
Recording over would never work. Why would people even try it? You would always end up with spots where both the new and old video would play at the same time. Also, UA-cam can't compress VHS because VHS bitrate is significantly lower than what UA-cam has.
Both Beta and VHS alternated between two heads located on opposite sides of the video drum. Switching between them happened at the bottom of each field causing the glitch you see. With overscan you normally don't see this on a TV but when converted for UA-cam the whole frame shows and you can see the switching noise.
OliverTwist i was comparing only between phone models and not the operating system. And technically iphone is inferior to other high end flagships from samsung,huawei but they sell more because they have more market appeal.
Technically, they're really not. Higher numbers in RAM and clock speed do not mean superior technology. That kind of assessment belongs in 2002, because technology is much more complex nowadays. The architecture and individual components are greatly superior in iPhones when compared to Android flagships.
Original Betamax has 250 horizontal lines with B 1 recording speed and original VHS has 240 horizontal lines with SP recording speed. In theory Betamax should be slightly better resolution , but only 10 lines difference is not noticable for most people. Super Betamax VCRs came to the market in mid 80s which improved picture quality to 290 lines. About 20% improvement over previous gen Betamax. In this video, Super Betamax compared with VHS. And I think 1st Gen , 2nd gen and 3rd gen here means recording speed mode in these two formats: B 1 vs SP B 2. vs LP B 3 vs SLP ( EP) Sony eliminated B 1 speed recording on it's recorders after 1978 because of only one hour recording time on each tape compare to 2 or more hours recording with SP speed on VHS. And then Sony made B 2 recording mode as standard speed. Because B 2 half of the speed of B 1, first gen Betamax users saw noticable drop of picture quality. Now Sony's new recording standard has only 240 lines with random noise called finger print which was noticable for some people. Nothing better than VHS. In 1985 Sony introduced Super Betamax and as mentioned before with 290 lines and with some electronic image processing developments by that time, Sony improved picture quality over the standard VHS with no incompatibility issues with previous gen Betamax players. In my opinion this comparison is not 100% fair. They should be comared this way: B 2 vs SP B 3 vs LP (or EP) Tape speed of B 2 is less than SP and also B 3 is less than LP but a little greater than EP. In this comparison Super Betamax again would have slightly edge over VHS but not as much as what we are seeing in this video. We would see slightly little difference. Because of the design of the heads in Betamax ( larger and higher rotational speed) and ability to record in higher frequency, Sony improved it's picture resolution noticably from 250 to 290 lines without problems with it's previous Betamax VCRs. Now my conclusion: -Were Betamax superior than VHS? -In some aspects yes. Picture quality, smaller tape and better HiFi because of higher frequency band used for recording than VHS does. But smaller cassette also means less tape and less tape means less recording time. This with bad marketing were two main reasons why Betamax lost the format war.
@SebiStudios2 That's called "Head switching noise". It affects VHS, U-Matic, Beta and many other tape formats. It should be expected because of the way the tape players work
Visually SuperBeta practically spanked VHS in this video and I am sure there was alot of quality loss when converting it and everything... But what was the sound like? I imagine sound would of been the same quality between the two?
VHS was significantly cheaper though, and had a wider selection of things you could watch on it. Not only that, but the Betamax was limited to an hour per tape, so you would have to switch tapes out to continue watching
So obvious betamax is better. The waves are clearer, the buildings actually have windows instead of a tall flat surface, the flowers aren't just a pink fuzzy substance, and the trees definitely have far more detailed leaves.
I'm very impressive for VHS/Betamax generation loss because because when I was young, some of the priviate video tapes for renting I ever watched seems like generated for many times. But in later days, when VCD is implemented but not very famous, there are many tapes that recorded from VCD, you can see the swich Disc B scene on the tape. In this tape it only shows 3rd generation of tape, but to this tape it was also a generation, so what we saw is a 4th generation.
Porn was not the only reason that Beta failed. Sony had a hand in it with their choice to have a restrictive licensing policy while VHS was basically turned into an "open format."
Don't know about the USA but here in Australia Video stores had two separate sections. A VHS section and a Beta section and that went on for 3 or 4 years until VHS won.
There is also D-VHS and Beta-Cam, also both very good quality! And the V 2000 system from Philips was also very good quality, they have all a direct drive system inside their machines.
the Betamax technology of compression and recording was better than the reuploaded and by force edited new video players or format versions like this on UA-cam? and the sound how it was
@@electrictroy2010 True, unfortunately. Another reason for it's downfall, was the Beta format could not hold as much record time, because of the higher speed of footage being hauled through the heads. I believe one "just" barely got 2 hours worth of record time on the Betas, vs 6, to 8 hours on the much slower rolling VHS cassettes. I was lucky to have gotten the Super Beta HiFi model, back in the mid 80s. Beautiful picture, compared to VHS.
@@ThomasGrillo This applies only to NTSC countries. In PAL lands, VHS and Beta running times were very similar. A normal tape on VHS was E180, three hours compare to Beta L750 of 3 hours and 15 minutes, so usually Beta gave the longer running times. Longer tapes were available for both formats (VHS slightly longer), but E180 and L750 were the most popular for a long time.
The industrial Betacam system has NOTHING in common with consumer Betamax other than the size of the tape - which, with Betacam is the small cassette because Betacam also has a larger cassette that is slightly bigger than a VHS cassette and records longer.
This is sales tape used by Sony to put down VHS. Although the VHS didn't have the same quality as betamax, I don't think it was this bad either. Go to 1:04, see that second building down? You can't even see the windows in the VHS version, I am pretty sure Sony made the quality a little worse than reality on this sales tape.
the Betamax had the better picture quality but could only hold 1 hour of video recording, the VHS had double the capacity plus the VHS Cassette Player was a lighter weight than the Betamax Player, although the construction of the Betamax Player was a solid build.
+Alexa Kovacs not true. At the start in 1976 maybe but in 1977 I was watching full movies on 1 tape on a Betamax. Betamax ADDED THE SPINER IN THERE THATS WHAT SAVED TAPE LENGTH. bETAMAX LOST OUT BECAUSE THEY WERE EXPENSIVE AND AT A TIME WHEN YOU COULLD RENT A VHS VERY CHEAPLY FROM THE SHOPS. also WIEGHT OF THE PLAYERS GOT LIGHTER OVER THE YEARS SO EVEN WEIGHT WAS NOT A ISSUE WHEN BETAMAX LOST.
+munchy 22 Yes, as a kid I was watching 5 episodes of Masked Rider Super-1 (Japanese series) on a Betamax. Each episode is over 20 minutes (24 minutes for the whole thing, but there was some cutting out of the ending theme), so it must have been a tape of 1 hour 40 (probably more like 1 hour 45-50+) minutes at the least. So given that information it must have been a 120 minutes tape. That series aired in 1980 so it must have been around that time. We later got VHS but I was quite put off by the worse picture quality...
realogre32 That is actually a bit more bullshit, maybe its true for America but VHS was just cheaper format overall in Europe, Africa and Asia and that is why people tended to get VHS instead, fuck VHS did not even die out completely in Norway until 2010! Because it was way cheaper than DVD, you could get 10 VHS for one DVD! It was quite a bargain and cause everyone are blind as fuck in Norway its no wonder they choose VHS over DVD. In Asia it was hard to get Betamax rights and because VHS did not need that sort of crap everyone picked it and it was again cheaper format.
The Betacam formats have nothing to do with consumer Betamax other than the size of the small tapes. The larger Betacam tapes look like VHS. Betamax and Betacam and its variants are completely different systems - VHS and Beta actually have more in common than Betacam and Betamax.
You all need to take in consideration that people just bought what was popular, back in the 80s/90s there was no internet to research products, in fact, no one really researched further than asking relatives or specialty magazines.
It really doesn't help that this video is, itself, dubbed off VHS: Note the VHS head switching error (that little glitch at the bottom of the screen in VHS videos). First-gen Beta looks like VHS HQ. SuperBeta was breathtaking, nearly broadcast quality, and until DVD recordables, the best analog NTSC recording system you could get for home use. It's sad VHS won the format wars.
Actually "Betamax ED" was the best the format ever got at about 500 lines of resolution and better color saturation. It was basically capable of full NTSC broadcast quality, but needed special metal tapes to record that quality. Super Beta maxed out at 300 lines of resolution. D-VHS was the best magnetic tape ever got at 1080i.
Looks like Super Beta just has a sharpening filter applied. Looks worse to me than the VHS because of that. Check out all the dark edges around highlights. Maybe it would look okay on a CRT.
The cheaper usually always wins. Strangely though, every time there's a format war, Sony is always involved. I was actually really surprised to see that Blu-ray won this time around. HD DVD was cheaper and when I got my player, I got five movies bundled with it, that Warner thankfully allowed me to trade in for Blu-ray at $5/movie.
Electronics used to be quality made, and expensive. Now, they are cheap, cheap, cheap, and made in China. The format is also much more simple. Expense had less of an impact regarding Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
DVDs and Blurays are both a waste of money and really why are we even using disks anymore? Nowadays we have better technology for storage.. We could easily have an android box the size of a cell phone and put movies on a read only memory card in super HD quality. The reason for us still using the disk format is simple... If you love a movie or a band and your disk gets scratched up, you either download a copy or you buy another disk. Memory cards and cartridges don't have that problem.
Even today in 2013, its virtually "Super-difficult"to get a Super-VHS Machine. S-VHS Machines are still current tape-technology. Super BetaMax from Sony is "Broadcast Quality"just Super-Exquisite beautiful razor-sharp resolution". Super BetaMax is on par with S-VHS(Super VHS.). I hope Japan & China can produce affordable"Super-VHS machines"again for this 21st Century. Thats how good "Super-VHS" & "Super-BetaMax"really is razor-sharp compared to standard VHS. There is a Market for S-VHS & S-Beta!
I think you mean "Betamax ED" which was 500 lines of resolution and better color saturation. "Super Beta" maxed out at 300 lines and "Super VHS" maxed out at 400 lines. D-VHS was the best magnetic tape ever got at 1080i.
superbeta is sharper then vhs tape,but they all look blurry. despites vhs tapes are bigger in size then super beta tapes. for some reasons the designers of vhs chosed to mix and blurs 512 video lines down to 252 lines,why they dit that is behind me. but it,s clear that superbeta stores everything in s-video at 512 lines.
hi yeh ED-Beta has 500 lines, S-VHS only has 420 lines and VHS was only 240 lines :( But D-VHS has 1080 lines in digital at 28Mbps witch it better then even HD TV (that's 25Mbps) :)
+Paul Hicks So does regular VHS and Beta (and DVD). Don't confuse the number of scan lines (the vertical resolution) with the horizontal resolution, which is what is being discussed here. Anything recorded in PAL always has 625 scan lines; everything recorded in NTSC has 525.
What in the world does SuperBeta have to do with VHS? SuperBeta was a high resolution format similar to SuperVHS. You can't compare a high resolution format with standard VHS. You'd have to compare it to the high resolution VHS system.
![VIVA SONY LAND 1980's Betamax Promotional Video [PART 1/2]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/c1dJK4IgDx0/mqdefault.jpg)
Like plasma and LCD. People listen to ads and buy the one wich is cheaper to manufacture and let the better product die.
yep the ignorant masses will always choose quantity over quality think iPod over minidisc
***** That's what I said lol.
FullMoonDogPisti it wasn't ads that killed betamax... it was porno that killed betamax
@Fur Q yes, you're right. That's why more porno was produced on VHS.
Nope, porn decides the winner in format wars. Porn went with VHS, Betamax died. Porn went with Blu-Ray, HD-DVD died.
Porn was widely available on Beta and in fact, appeared first on Beta since Beta was on the market for almost a year and a half before VHS. It wasn't until the mid-1980's that all companies started cutting back on their Beta releases. VHS won the battle because RCA put its advertising muscle behind it and sold the units for only slightly more than they were paying for them from Matsushita. Their original ad slogan, "4 Hours, $1000, SelectaVision" drove VHS sales right from the start.
It should have been marketed as Pornamax, with the slogan "Taking your adult film viewing experience to the cliMAX."
Even with the fuzzy quality of this video the differences are still clear. What a shame VHS won the battle.
Super Beta and VHS are quite similar in quality
It's a shame that ED BETA was too expensive, otherwise it would have taken off.
Not so fast. Betamax tapes were limited to only an hour, so every movie required multiple tapes; playback ergonomics is a factor. Betamax was also more expensive and had a heavier player (36 lbs).
BUT THERE WAS FEW SPEEDS TO THE TAPE MRTOWELRACK
***** True. Both Betamax and VHS had options to slow down tapes for longer playback times, but there's some contention over how much these methods affected quality.
As an aside, I'm so happy that this is in the past now. I have Lawrence of Arabia in HD on my phone. I can seamlessly watch from start to finish and easily switch to anywhere in the film. Also, surround sound is a happy bonus.
That was about SuperBeta, not about Betamax. There was a similar and even Bette format for VHS: SVHS.
@texasgungeek
I definately agree. I have VHS tapes recorded in 2006 and 2007 that are unwatchable, but I see Betamax tapes recorded 35 years ago that look as if they were just recorded.
I don't get it, Super Beta looks great!
Worse marketing and poor design choices added up. Sometimes the better product loses
SuperBetamax arrived in 1985. It was too late because VHS had already become the defacto standard by that point
.
Sony consistently has been putting out better formats for AV. It's too bad they lost this one. However, Blu-ray was a success and even though it was initially more expensive than DVD and HD-DVD, it's now of equal cost and of much better quality. The discs hold more content, are harder to scratch, and forced the industry to evolve. Congrats, Sony!
You forget that you can't play them unless you have a player wired into the internet to do DRM rights scanning and forced update checking. So Blu-Ray can fuck off.
My Blu Ray player has never connected to the internet and it plays all my Blu Ray discs (about 20).
MrWolfSnack What are you talking about you don't need a internet connection to play Blu-Ray movies? You can play them all offline on PS4/PS3 and regular Blu-Ray players.
I wish I could agree. Blu Ray was handled so awful when it came out. Most encodes where shit upscales and still in mpeg2. HD DVD was using VC-1 from theget go and had a much better initial track record for picture quality. Blu ray did win out and the disk are better now but, Sony wasted tons of money winning a format war that didnt matter. DVD sales still account for a huge amount of movie saves and blu ray never really took over the market like they wanted. It makes up around only 40% of movie sales. The isssue is neither Sony nor Toshiba forced dvd out of the market. They should have used HD DVD with DVD on one side of the disk and HD on the other and not offered another version at all. If you don't force customers to buy into the better format they wont. Look how long VHS lasted when laserdisc had been around since the 70s. Picture and audio quality is normally the least important feature to the average joe blow.
@@MrWolfSnack you're getting the original Xbox one confused with a Blu-ray player
This reminds me of the 'HD versus 4K' demo videos I see at stores nowadays.
HD and 4K are not competing one is replacing one .
@@RobertK1993 You’re right is really not a competition thing at all but Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD for example yes!
Sony always had better quality when it came to sound and video but they always had a bug up their arse about licencing their proprietary technology
This is apples & oranges.
It clearly says "SuperBeta", which is a high band format not compatible with Betamax, similar to S-VHS being the incompatible high band version of VHS. Of course a high band format will be superior to a vanilla VHS, but that is not a fair comparison. A fair comparison would be vanilla Betamax vs vanilla VHS, or SuperBeta vs S-VHS. Bet you'd not notice much difference with either.
The thing is, all consumer video formats of the 1970s and early 80s compromised heavily on picture quality - basically throwing away half of the resolution of a broadcast quality TV signal plus some other "dirty" tricks - in order to be able to make VCRs affordable to consumers at all. VHS, Betamax the original Video8 and the European Video2000 (which most North Americans here won't have heard of) do this.
Only when mid 1980s technology hand advanced enough, did it become possible to sell near-broadcast quality VCRs at affordable prices to consumers, but it did involve breaking compatibilty. This is how the then new formats SuperBeta (later ED Beta), S-VHS and Hi8 came about. And of course they're bound superior to any of the formats of the previous generation.
Super Beta was +20% sharpness. 250 to 290 Horizontal lines. SUPER VHS = ED BETA, 400/500 horizontal lines. Tapes super beta can played in normal beta deck, but with sobremodulation.
I was never aware of the video quality differences between them.
I like the VHS better. The beta a lil too harsh. Plus SVHS and SVHS-C was a thing and more open and not proprietary sony controlled but also cheap.
SuperBetamax arrived in 1985. It was too late because VHS had already become the defacto standard by that point
.
I remember seeing this material back then. Super beta almost looked better than 3/4" (though the 3/4 had much less video noise). The head switching artifact is common to all 2-head helical scan machines, even 3/4" (except the broadcast designed BVU series of 3/4 decks that moved the playback head switch down to the first line of vertical sync). The head switch was placed 6 lines above the V sync in consumer machines to retain stable vertical sync under non-optimum conditions.
Hardly any SuperBeta in the UK - we mainly had the vanilla Beta machines - mono ones at that.
The average consumer couldn't discern any marked difference between the two so it came down to amrketing and price.
At this juncture of home entertainment people simply were excited about being able to watch movies, tv shows, and yes, porn at home anytime they wished. It was also a revelation to have the ability to record something om these new formats .
They didn't care much about slight differences in color saturation or resolution . Sony went about it the wrong way....
To be honest, even the VHS isn't too bad. The only issue is after recording over them, yeah, after the 2nd recording, they look like crap. However, it's also important to look at it this way... Remember, these were first recorded, then re-recorded and dubbed over, and then converted to digital, as... Well, it's on UA-cam now. AND, youtube compresses it even further... So that's about 4 stages of lossy formatting/compression to mess with the quality of these tapes. It's 7 on the 3rd gen copies shown in the video...
However, I do have to give it to the Beta tapes, even after all that, they really fared quite well. Actually, why I'm even looking this up, is because I've got a lot of VHS tapes from when I was a kid, of so many different movies and shows. Likewise, my grandma literally must have had 2000 vhs tapes. Probably about 1000 for my mom. Lots of stuff, and lots of watching time in those tapes.
...And to be honest, I can at times, be a snob about video quality, but I broke out a couple of those VHS tapes, and even after all these years, they're totally decent quality! However, most of those were ruined in Hurricane Sandy. I'm from New York. But going back to quality, this is coming from someone with a $1200 gaming/video editing PC who is able to play pretty much everything at max settings, 60+fps, as well as watching Blu-Ray movies on that same machine.
I think part of it is nostalgia, though. Kind of like people who go and buy classic game consoles like NES, or heck, Atari 2600. Actually, that's a worse example, because the gap between the 2600 and current games... And VHS to Blu-Ray is not NEARLY as great. But what I mean is, while those older formats and technologies may be old, that doesn't make them bad. I think people need to stop being so superficial and appreciate how things were back then! Yes, I'm lucky enough to be able to get a great gaming PC, but I chose that over updating the rest of the TV's in my house. And even for that, to afford these things (just about) makes me thankful. I won't lie, I had to save up for quite a while for that build...
Anyway, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to enjoy the classic stuff. While the vast majority in America, even some people who are quite poor, can afford much better and much newer technology, that CERTAINLY shouldn't stop us from appreciating the old!
Recording over would never work. Why would people even try it? You would always end up with spots where both the new and old video would play at the same time. Also, UA-cam can't compress VHS because VHS bitrate is significantly lower than what UA-cam has.
XtremeConditions Nice post. But you have a tendency to lose focus on your topic quick :-)
yeah, it almost close to the Red cinema quality
SuperBetamax arrived in 1985. It was too late because VHS had already become the defacto standard by that point
.
Thanks for posting this. I don't know why I like this so much.
Both Beta and VHS alternated between two heads located on opposite sides of the video drum. Switching between them happened at the bottom of each field causing the glitch you see. With overscan you normally don't see this on a TV but when converted for UA-cam the whole frame shows and you can see the switching noise.
Ah... how does this make any sense, these formats weren't even competing with each other. Wouldn't it make sense to do Super Betamax vs Super VHS...?
Sony later got its revenge with Blu-Ray but damn i missed the analog nature of both Betamax and VHS back then.
proof that superior technology isn't always the popular technology, like the iphone
+90AlmostFamous 1st iPhone is not popular? What are you talking about? 2nd It's not meant to be mass market like android ;)
OliverTwist i was comparing only between phone models and not the operating system. And technically iphone is inferior to other high end flagships from samsung,huawei but they sell more because they have more market appeal.
Betamax could only hold 1 hour of video. So in terms, neither were superior technology
Technically, they're really not. Higher numbers in RAM and clock speed do not mean superior technology. That kind of assessment belongs in 2002, because technology is much more complex nowadays. The architecture and individual components are greatly superior in iPhones when compared to Android flagships.
+Asada Coehlo Do you have any specific examples of that or are you just making shit up?
Original Betamax has 250 horizontal lines with B 1 recording speed and original VHS has 240 horizontal lines with SP recording speed. In theory Betamax should be slightly better resolution , but only 10 lines difference is not noticable for most people. Super Betamax VCRs came to the market in mid 80s which improved picture quality to 290 lines. About 20% improvement over previous gen Betamax. In this video, Super Betamax compared with VHS.
And I think 1st Gen , 2nd gen and 3rd gen here means recording speed mode in these two formats:
B 1 vs SP
B 2. vs LP
B 3 vs SLP ( EP)
Sony eliminated B 1 speed recording on it's recorders after 1978 because of only one hour recording time on each tape compare to 2 or more hours recording with SP speed on VHS.
And then Sony made B 2 recording mode as standard speed. Because
B 2 half of the speed of B 1, first gen Betamax users saw noticable drop of picture quality. Now Sony's new recording standard has only 240 lines with random noise called finger print which was noticable for some people. Nothing better than VHS. In 1985 Sony introduced Super Betamax and as mentioned before with 290 lines and with some electronic image processing developments by that time, Sony improved picture quality over the standard VHS with no incompatibility issues with previous gen Betamax players.
In my opinion this comparison is not 100% fair. They should be comared this way:
B 2 vs SP
B 3 vs LP (or EP)
Tape speed of B 2 is less than SP and also B 3 is less than LP but a little greater than EP.
In this comparison Super Betamax again would have slightly edge over VHS but not as much as what we are seeing in this video. We would see slightly little difference.
Because of the design of the heads in Betamax ( larger and higher rotational speed) and ability to record in higher frequency, Sony improved it's picture resolution noticably from 250 to 290 lines without problems with it's previous Betamax VCRs.
Now my conclusion:
-Were Betamax superior than VHS?
-In some aspects yes. Picture quality, smaller tape and better HiFi because of higher frequency band used for recording than VHS does.
But smaller cassette also means less tape and less tape means less recording time. This with bad marketing were two main reasons why Betamax lost the format war.
@SebiStudios2 That's called "Head switching noise". It affects VHS, U-Matic, Beta and many other tape formats. It should be expected because of the way the tape players work
Visually SuperBeta practically spanked VHS in this video and I am sure there was alot of quality loss when converting it and everything... But what was the sound like? I imagine sound would of been the same quality between the two?
Super beta was 20% more sharper than VHS quality. (250 to 290 horizontal lines).
Beta Hi-Fi sound gave sound that, even though analoy, was comparable to CD sound. VHS later had VHS Hi-Fi but it had tracking issues
VHS was significantly cheaper though, and had a wider selection of things you could watch on it. Not only that, but the Betamax was limited to an hour per tape, so you would have to switch tapes out to continue watching
Guys I can't find my Super Beta switch. How can I watch this video properly?
So obvious betamax is better. The waves are clearer, the buildings actually have windows instead of a tall flat surface, the flowers aren't just a pink fuzzy substance, and the trees definitely have far more detailed leaves.
Super Beta-Cappa-Alpha looks so good on Blu, look at that sky, hmmm...
Wow! That was a big difference in picture quality for the time!
Yup, and there were other big differences as well. That's what lead to Beta's loss to VHS.
VHSの特徴はダビングを重ねるに連れて画が滲んだようになってくることですかね。
ベータはそういったことへの耐性が業界関係者に買われ、デファクトスタンダードになっていたんですね。
Hey let's compare VHS to a much more expensive format that had 10 years longer in development, that's a fair comparison right?
I'm very impressive for VHS/Betamax generation loss because because when I was young, some of the priviate video tapes for renting I ever watched seems like generated for many times. But in later days, when VCD is implemented but not very famous, there are many tapes that recorded from VCD, you can see the swich Disc B scene on the tape.
In this tape it only shows 3rd generation of tape, but to this tape it was also a generation, so what we saw is a 4th generation.
This looks like they were both recorded on VHS, but the "Betamax" version one the left was edited on Sony Vegas or something...
@schuchnet yes but that was already too late :(
Porn was not the only reason that Beta failed. Sony had a hand in it with their choice to have a restrictive licensing policy while VHS was basically turned into an "open format."
love the Singapore footage at 1.05
Don't know about the USA but here in Australia Video stores had two separate sections. A VHS section and a Beta section and that went on for 3 or 4 years until VHS won.
Sweet bias, bro!
Wow. 80p vs 40p. I'm sold!
There is also D-VHS and Beta-Cam, also both very good quality! And the V 2000 system from Philips was also very good quality, they have all a direct drive system inside their machines.
Betacam was what the professionals used
Then came the W-VHS which was only in Japan and it was short lived until the DVD took over.
V2000 is pretty lousy actually. It uses a very high recording density. I have a fleet of working V2000 machines but none compare to a good Beta.
the Betamax technology of compression and recording was better than the reuploaded and by force edited new video players or format versions like this on UA-cam?
and the sound how it was
As far as i know, VHS won just because there was more porn on VHS. So the better system literally lost to a bunch of wankers XD
CerealKiller k. But you still don´t get mein Pr0n!
CerealKiller that´s the spirit.
It's a fun answer to give... but JVC befriended the video rental business, and the machine cost less. More titles for rent, on a lower cost machine.
1337fraggzb00N and you know that how you weirdo
I've heard this rumor, too. Other reasons VHS likely won are that the VHS tapes were longer and both tape and machine in VHS were cheaper than Beta
WOW! I'd forgotten just how much better Beta was than VHS. Toobad VHS won out over record time capabilities. Thanks for sharing this.
SuperBetamax arrived in 1985. It was too late because VHS had already become the defacto standard by that point
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@@electrictroy2010 True, unfortunately. Another reason for it's downfall, was the Beta format could not hold as much record time, because of the higher speed of footage being hauled through the heads. I believe one "just" barely got 2 hours worth of record time on the Betas, vs 6, to 8 hours on the much slower rolling VHS cassettes. I was lucky to have gotten the Super Beta HiFi model, back in the mid 80s. Beautiful picture, compared to VHS.
@@ThomasGrillo This applies only to NTSC countries. In PAL lands, VHS and Beta running times were very similar. A normal tape on VHS was E180, three hours compare to Beta L750 of 3 hours and 15 minutes, so usually Beta gave the longer running times. Longer tapes were available for both formats (VHS slightly longer), but E180 and L750 were the most popular for a long time.
The industrial Betacam system has NOTHING in common with consumer Betamax other than the size of the tape - which, with Betacam is the small cassette because Betacam also has a larger cassette that is slightly bigger than a VHS cassette and records longer.
el catv sólo vive 14 canales? de pronto alguien sabe si puede coger más canales
I'm not sure why I haven't heard of "SuperBeta" before.
Que bonitos tiempos estos de los betamax y vhs
Because S-VHS wouldn't be released for another 2 years (1987 in Japan before coming to the USA).
I'm glad they won this time around :)
superb!
In the next video we should compare DVD's with 4K Blu-rays...
That's a fair comparison right?
In 1985 however this comparison was trivial considering that Laserdisc was better than both of them.
Laserdisc cold not record. The whole idea of comparing several generations is to sell to those who create content.
This is sales tape used by Sony to put down VHS. Although the VHS didn't have the same quality as betamax, I don't think it was this bad either. Go to 1:04, see that second building down? You can't even see the windows in the VHS version, I am pretty sure Sony made the quality a little worse than reality on this sales tape.
i remember my father saying in europe people though philips video2000 was going to win and he almost bought one. but then VHS still won.
@SuperFunkDoctor That was only true of the very early models. In 1977 they already had a two hour model; by 1979, three hours.
OK, I'm sold. Where can I get me one of these SuperBeta sets? Damn the price!
the Betamax had the better picture quality but could only hold 1 hour of video recording, the VHS had double the capacity plus the VHS Cassette Player was a lighter weight than the Betamax Player, although the construction of the Betamax Player was a solid build.
+Alexa Kovacs not true. At the start in 1976 maybe but in 1977 I was watching full movies on 1 tape on a Betamax. Betamax ADDED THE SPINER IN THERE THATS WHAT SAVED TAPE LENGTH. bETAMAX LOST OUT BECAUSE THEY WERE EXPENSIVE AND AT A TIME WHEN YOU COULLD RENT A VHS VERY CHEAPLY FROM THE SHOPS. also WIEGHT OF THE PLAYERS GOT LIGHTER OVER THE YEARS SO EVEN WEIGHT WAS NOT A ISSUE WHEN BETAMAX LOST.
+munchy 22 Yes, as a kid I was watching 5 episodes of Masked Rider Super-1 (Japanese series) on a Betamax. Each episode is over 20 minutes (24 minutes for the whole thing, but there was some cutting out of the ending theme), so it must have been a tape of 1 hour 40 (probably more like 1 hour 45-50+) minutes at the least. So given that information it must have been a 120 minutes tape. That series aired in 1980 so it must have been around that time.
We later got VHS but I was quite put off by the worse picture quality...
If Betamax looked that much better than VHS, how come I never heard of it until recently? o-O
ChampionRevilo because in the 80's more pornos went with VHS so they sold more VCR's... i know that sounds like BS but that is what happened
realogre32 That is actually a bit more bullshit, maybe its true for America but VHS was just cheaper format overall in Europe, Africa and Asia and that is why people tended to get VHS instead, fuck VHS did not even die out completely in Norway until 2010! Because it was way cheaper than DVD, you could get 10 VHS for one DVD! It was quite a bargain and cause everyone are blind as fuck in Norway its no wonder they choose VHS over DVD.
In Asia it was hard to get Betamax rights and because VHS did not need that sort of crap everyone picked it and it was again cheaper format.
@verik2kk
No its true. i checked myself .Vhs tape is blur than betamax and its a superbeta :)
It just looks like they turned the sharpness knob up on the Super Beta ones IMHO...
The Betacam formats have nothing to do with consumer Betamax other than the size of the small tapes. The larger Betacam tapes look like VHS. Betamax and Betacam and its variants are completely different systems - VHS and Beta actually have more in common than Betacam and Betamax.
Then one year later SVHS (Where did the Super part come from I wonder) blew Super Beta out of the water.. Weird right?
ED Beta would make a comeback against SVHS.
I actually do have an SVHS deck and a SuperBeta deck, and hoping to get an ED Beta
So Betamax is VCR HD? =P
yikes what happened at 4:53??
You all need to take in consideration that people just bought what was popular, back in the 80s/90s there was no internet to research products, in fact, no one really researched further than asking relatives or specialty magazines.
Woulnd't mind havin' a beta recorder (just think they're kinda neat...)
It really doesn't help that this video is, itself, dubbed off VHS: Note the VHS head switching error (that little glitch at the bottom of the screen in VHS videos).
First-gen Beta looks like VHS HQ. SuperBeta was breathtaking, nearly broadcast quality, and until DVD recordables, the best analog NTSC recording system you could get for home use. It's sad VHS won the format wars.
Actually "Betamax ED" was the best the format ever got at about 500 lines of resolution and better color saturation. It was basically capable of full NTSC broadcast quality, but needed special metal tapes to record that quality. Super Beta maxed out at 300 lines of resolution. D-VHS was the best magnetic tape ever got at 1080i.
they should have made a beta tape that could hold almost as long or longer hours than what vhs could handle and call it ultra gold beta
単独で見ていると解らないけど比べて見るとこんなに差が有ったのか…
Great compare, but with super beta is highly comparable S-VHS instead VHS...
That was one of the main reasons, JVC ended up winning more 3rd party companies and therefore it was more widely available.
So by 1988, Sony went with it and released the VHS VCR which was a model SLV-555, Sony very first VHS VCR while they were still making Betamax VCR’s.
@@Musicradio77Networkcheap beta model Sl-s600 sl-s400 very popular in sudamerica or Phillipines.
Looks like Super Beta just has a sharpening filter applied. Looks worse to me than the VHS because of that. Check out all the dark edges around highlights. Maybe it would look okay on a CRT.
The cheaper usually always wins. Strangely though, every time there's a format war, Sony is always involved. I was actually really surprised to see that Blu-ray won this time around. HD DVD was cheaper and when I got my player, I got five movies bundled with it, that Warner thankfully allowed me to trade in for Blu-ray at $5/movie.
Electronics used to be quality made, and expensive. Now, they are cheap, cheap, cheap, and made in China. The format is also much more simple. Expense had less of an impact regarding Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
what they dont tell you is that betamax only has 60 minutes!
Sound?
Obviously someone had their cellphone on.
But then JVC came out with VHS HQ, which is exactly the same thing
i use my beta every day its a sl f 40 and now 30 years old but still going
Super beta wins. You could see windows on the skyscraper as opposed to the VHS whilst it was all fuzzy.
But how can people rather prefer lower image quality just because it is cheaper? For nature filmmaker so should be well Betamax apply?
Well, that's the way the world works. I don't know what else to tell you.
Betamax just looks so much cleaner
wow all those years using VHS what a waste of time
DVD's are a waste of money.
DVDs and Blurays are both a waste of money and really why are we even using disks anymore? Nowadays we have better technology for storage.. We could easily have an android box the size of a cell phone and put movies on a read only memory card in super HD quality.
The reason for us still using the disk format is simple... If you love a movie or a band and your disk gets scratched up, you either download a copy or you buy another disk. Memory cards and cartridges don't have that problem.
Even today in 2013, its virtually "Super-difficult"to get a Super-VHS Machine. S-VHS Machines are still current tape-technology. Super BetaMax from Sony is "Broadcast Quality"just Super-Exquisite beautiful razor-sharp resolution". Super BetaMax is on par with S-VHS(Super VHS.). I hope Japan & China can produce affordable"Super-VHS machines"again for this 21st Century. Thats how good "Super-VHS" & "Super-BetaMax"really is razor-sharp compared to standard VHS. There is a Market for S-VHS & S-Beta!
I think you mean "Betamax ED" which was 500 lines of resolution and better color saturation. "Super Beta" maxed out at 300 lines and "Super VHS" maxed out at 400 lines. D-VHS was the best magnetic tape ever got at 1080i.
@texasgungeek whoa... the same as with the Bluray vs HD-DVD wars?
No porn on HD-DVD.
VHS was more economical… VHSs could fit up to 12 hours if you had the right one and Beta could only fit up to four…
You clearly did never see the outstanding quality VIDEO2000 produced...
lol...what was the last video porn available for VHS?
Ask your mom she's the talent.
I selected vhs because my friends had it.
VHS is highest quality.
superbeta is sharper then vhs tape,but they all look blurry.
despites vhs tapes are bigger in size then super beta tapes.
for some reasons the designers of vhs chosed to mix and blurs 512 video lines down to 252 lines,why they dit that is behind me.
but it,s clear that superbeta stores everything in s-video at 512 lines.
Why is the quality of VHS worsening with the advancement in generations, as seen in this video?
hi yeh ED-Beta has 500 lines, S-VHS only has 420 lines and VHS was only 240 lines :(
But D-VHS has 1080 lines in digital at 28Mbps witch it better then even HD TV (that's 25Mbps) :)
It should be Super-beta vs S-VHS to be fair.
S-VHS almost doubles the resolution, from 240 lines to 400 if I'm not mistaken :)
+AAAZ2A 625i lines for PAL :)
Paul Hicks You mean with Super-Beta? Well, there's no doubt Beta has better quality, but bad tape economy.
Nope, S-VHS in the UK had 625 lines.
Paul Hicks Oh, I didn't know that :)
+Paul Hicks So does regular VHS and Beta (and DVD). Don't confuse the number of scan lines (the vertical resolution) with the horizontal resolution, which is what is being discussed here. Anything recorded in PAL always has 625 scan lines; everything recorded in NTSC has 525.
What in the world does SuperBeta have to do with VHS? SuperBeta was a high resolution format similar to SuperVHS. You can't compare a high resolution format with standard VHS. You'd have to compare it to the high resolution VHS system.
This was made in 1985. 2 years before the SVHS was even invented. It took even more time for SVHS to make it's way to the states.
Have you ever heard about ED-Beta?, ED-Beta was way better that S-VHS.
And S-VHS ?
I'm fkn sold
In 2062: RedRay vs DVD.2
HDTV 1985 style.
it looks like the 3rd generation of VHS is worse than its 1st generation :O!
VHS has simple mechanism compareto Betamax/....thus technicians supported VHS as it is easy to repair
Betamax em qualidade de imagem é melhor que o VHS
put it next to superVHS and see how it stacks up ...
SuoerBeta & VHS is never so bad than in this Video - your conversation is not good!