Tram Town
Sunday, December 21, 2003
| Category: Beta In that Sony history that I wrote about a few weeks ago, there wasn't much said about why Beta failed in the consumer field. An article on the Guardian site makes a number of interesting obsrvations, amongst them: Instead of poring over the sound and picture quality, reviewers could simply have taken the systems home. Their spouses/children/grandparents and everybody else would quickly have told them the truth. "We're going out tonight and I want to record a movie. That Betamax tape is useless: it isn't long enough. Get rid of it."It appears that VHS would have been a lot less likely to get a foothold if Sony had come up with a two hour tape. Also, specifying blank tapes by their physical length (see picture) rather than their play/record time seems to be the sort of mistakes only a technician would make. On The AFU and Urban Legend Archive lots of Beta/VHS myths are debunked, notably the whole "technically better" thing: Comparisons between VCRs with similar features showed no significant differences in performance. In fact, most of the differences could only be seen with sensitive instruments, and likely would never show up on most consumer grade television sets. In particular, the qualitative differences between the two formats were less than the differences between any two samples from the same manufacturer.They both looked pretty average compared with decent broadcast quality so the so-called technical superiority was at best a purist's argument. It seems to me that both formats would do the job for most punters but having two formats meant that advances such as the Hi-Fi variants came way more quickly. |
