This
week
at Flashbak, I also memorialized a dying technology: Sony’s Betamax.
Here’s
a snippet, and the url: (http://flashbak.com/product-genius-eulogy-sony-betamax-1975-2016-50462/
).
“In
March of 2016, Sony will stop manufacturing Betamax cassettes all-together. The loser in a format war against VHS
(developed by JVC) in the long ago 1970s and 1980s, the Betamax format first
entered the American marketplace in November of 1975.
With
cassettes sold in stores such as Sears and Radio Shack, Betamax, by some
standards, should have been the winner in its pitched battle against the VHS
tape format and consoles.
For
example, Betamax featured superior picture and superior sound to its
competitors and was described in promotional material as a “product of genius.”
The
SL-5000, an early model of the player, could tape one show while you watched
another, featured “express tuning,”
could front-load (instead of top-load, like early VCRS) and featured “record functions on the left” side of
the console, “playback functions on the
right.” And, of course, it came from a well-respected name: Sony.
But
Betamax featured two terrible – and indeed, fatal -- flaws.
The
first was that the Betamax recorder/players were much more expensive than VHS
players, and the second was that the Betamax cassettes -- small, almost square
devices -- could originally only tape for up to 60 minutes. A VHS cassette, by
comparison, could tape up for up to two hours.
Global
customers apparently wanted more affordable players, and more storage per tape.
Betamax attempted to strike back with later models such as its SL-8200, which
could tape programs from TV for “up to two
hours,” but by then it was too late.
Switching from VHS to Betamax meant that all your pre-recorded movies,
released by the studios, and all your taped-off-the-air programming would be
incompatible. Consumers would have had to ditch everything they had collected
and start over.
The
Betamax vs. VHS war ended with one clear winner, and it wasn’t Betamax.”
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