Who knew Jon Stewart had one of those Betamax cameras way back in the 80s????
Posted on 11/10/2015 9:04:27 PM PST by rdl6989
Bad news Betamax lovers. The 40-year-old video cassette tapes are about to die. Sony broke the news on its website Tuesday, saying it would stop making the tapes as of March 2016.
The cassette tapes went along with the Beta VCR, the first model which was released back in 1975. The system allowed viewers to record their favourite TV programs onto Betamax tapes. Sony discontinued the players back in 2002, but its cassette tapes lived on.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbc.ca ...
Probably be a while until the CD/DVD drives installed in computers goes the way of the floppy. I have an old Dell Inspiron desktop under my bookshelf and it doesn’t have a floppy drive, but has the pins for the ribbon cable on the M/B. Got a couple FDD’s in the drawer, but don’t miss them—1.44MB capacity? Well, I remember when that was the rule. Yuck. Heh!
I bought Beta.It’s one of the main reasons why I’ve avoided Mac like the plague.
Several times I came close to getting the equipment and making the effort of transferring all my old VHS tapes to DVD-R. But slowly but surely, so much of my material (like some of the vintage-tv material I had recorded on VHS) kept getting released commercially on DVD.
However, it does look like my remaining fare has rather little chance of becoming available. Old films that haven’t been syndicated to television since the days of 16mm, and likely haven’t even yet had copies digitally re-mastered by the studio owners themselves.
Sure but that never stopped the professional market. Lotsof Betas were sold to video production houses etc. Those are now all on the secondary market with collectors and hobbyists. It’s a cult ststus thing and they are sought after in that world.
Just look up anything with the word ‘vintage’ on ebay. It’s a license to print money.Anything old is sought after, usually by people with enough extra cash to have built a booming market.
For example, a Roland Juno 50 synthesizer. 5 years ago it got $3-400 at best. Today it’s headed north of $2000. Because it’s a famous name attached to old ‘retro’ musical gear.
It isn’t actually ‘worth’ a fraction of that. But they sell and resell in an upward spiral because people want the cool factor of ‘old tech’.
I had put it off for at least 10 years since I knew I wanted to do it. Now with this Elgato thing, I plug it into USB, connect via RCA cables to the VCR/Camera. Hit play, walk away and it's done. It used to be much more difficult. The software lets you trim out the blank space at the end and it saves it in a decently compressed format.
I had borrowed one of those VCR-->DVD recorders and that put me off for a few years since it didn't work worth a crap. It sorta worked, but the resolution was garbage.
Tyopo hell...Juno 60
There is a scene in the movie "Almost Famous" where Ben Fong Torres from Rolling Stone wants young William to send in his story using a Mojo. William asks what's a Mojo?
Ben says; "A mojo. It's a very modern machine that transmits pages over the telephone. It only takes 18 minutes a page."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPms9Lmi4LU
LOL!
I remember at one of my first office jobs using one of those early fax machines with the thermal paper. It was so cutting edge back then, but it took forever to send or receive more than a page or two. I also recall that the thermal paper had a tendency to not lay flat and want to roll up and that the text would fade out and the whole thing would become a big grey blur and become completely illegible after a short time.
“Just damn, next thing you’ll be telling me that I can’t buy Edison wax cylinders anymore.....”
An antique store around here has dozens of them for sale in the original boxes for $15 each.
Who knew Jon Stewart had one of those Betamax cameras way back in the 80s????
And here in 2015 I figured we’d be able to record video on USB thumb drives considering now they come in 256gb flavors. If the death of recordable DVDs becomes true, there is no useable portable recording medium available.
Yes, but a Beta box has very limited functionality these days Also, Super Beta and consumer Beta weren’t really all that compatible in the end. On top of which, they only ever made maybe a few hundred thousand Super Beta rigs (cameras, editing/playback decks) as opposed to literally a billion VHS rigs. One market has more options than the other.
Those are the ones Sony is discontinuing.
We already can do that - except we’re using SDHC and SDXC cards.
Its really more a nostalga than function thing, bu they do get used. Heck there are people that collect and watch garage sale old super 8 movies of family picnics as a hobby.
I never understood why VCRs even had clocks.
I watched my first Betamax video in 1979. It was the movie called “The Wild Geese.” Shortly thereafter I enlisted in the Marine Corps.
VCRs had clocks so you could set them to record a show, back when your only option was to set a timer - way back before DVRs. :P
My parents never could get theirs to work right. They would just hit “record” when a show came on.
I was thinking more of a replacement for the VCR, and not talking about DVR as that is locked by the cable company.
You can get non-locked DVRs these days. Or you can get a cheap HTPC that does that among many other things.
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