Posted on 08/30/2002 9:45:52 AM PDT by Darth Sidious
Betamax's manufacturer, Sony, has announced that it will make only 2,000 more machines for the Japanese market.
They have not been on sale in the rest of the world since 1998.
VHS became the dominant format by the mid-1980s
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Betamax was launched in 1975, and won many fans who said it was better quality than its VHS rival.
Some 2.3 million Betamax machines were sold worldwide in its peak year, 1984, but it soon went downhill as VHS became the format of choice for the film rental industry and in homes.
Just 2,800 machines were sold in the 12 months to March 2002.
"With digital machines and other new recording formats taking hold in the market, demand has continued to decline and it has become difficult to secure parts," Sony said in a statement.
Sony said it would continue to offer repairs and manufacture tapes for the format.
The professional Betamax format, Betacam, is still widely used in the television and film industries and will be unaffected.
But the recent rise of DVDs seems to have put the final nail in the coffin for Betamax home players.
In the 1980s, many video rental chains preferred the VHS format.
Betamax lovers became so passionate about the format in the face of competition from VHS that they set up the Betaphile Club in 1988.
The picture and sound quality of Beta was superior to VHS, Betaphiles say, although VHS tapes had a longer duration.
A total of 18 million Betamax machines were sold around the world, but no new ones will be made after the end of 2002.
Sony is now planning to focus its efforts on new digital technologies.
Am rather surprised the number was this high :-)
The article doesn't mention the real reason why Betamax never won out over VHS, though the audio/video quality of Betamax is better than VHS. When Sony first came out with the Betamax format, the president of the company ordered the home version be unable to record anything over 1 hour. He thought that no one would want to tape anything longer than that. The minimum "full" load of VHS is 2 hours, with 6 if you want to sacrifice quality for quantity.
Turns out people wanted to record more than one hour, after all.
The story doesn't mention it but I wonder if this concerns only the consumer market. Walk into most every TV station in the world and the cameras and editing decks are predominantly Beta. Sony originally owned both formats but after seeing the superior quality of Beta, sold VHS to JVC.
Not so. Pioneer, TEAC and Toshiba all had Beta decks on the market in the 80s.
Quadraphonic 8-track tapes!
To this day I never heard such an interesting effect as the concentric audio swirling in John Lennons #9 Dream.
Quadraphonic 8-track tapes!
To this day I never heard such an interesting effect as the concentric audio swirling in John Lennons #9 Dream.
Quadraphonic 8-track tapes!
To this day I never heard such an interesting effect as the concentric audio swirling in John Lennons #9 Dream.
That was in the Japanese home market, though I'm sure a few of the Beta machines managed to sneak into the U.S. each year. There is still a small number of Beta faithful who would rather fight than switch. Amazingly, it seems that the Beta format is going to be around as long as VHS, which is currently on life-support.
Yeah, that break that often ocurred in the middle of a song when the player switched tracks really added something special to the musical experience. And when the tape would foul and entangle inside the player, and get pulled out in great lengths when you removed the casette from the opening: THAT was sheer joy for us engineering types who like tinkering and repairing things!
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