Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Vaya con Dios, Betamax

Sony is finally shutting it down 40 years after introducing it.  It seems that after losing the home video format war, it dominated the professional news recording business for decades.

2 comments:

Guffaw in AZ said...

Knew a guy who had a pre-conformed VCR. Used VHS sized tapes, but was internally configured differently. Top loading.
When it 'gave up the ghost' (in the mid-80s) he could no longer watch the hours of self-recorded movies he'd made, many John Wayne, off commercial TV!
It was a Maganavox, and had vacuum tubes inside!
Another friend had a Betamax for years. Every time we drive by the closed, defunct video store, he'd yell, "What about my lifetime membership?!"

The times, they are a changin'...

gfa

STxAR said...

We used them when I worked in TV in the mid-90's. They were smaller than VHS and the cases were more substantial. It took many copies of copies before you noticed a degradation in quality.

I wondered how long it would take for digital recording to kill them.