I was wondering why the Paramount rep from the quotation above linked his company's release of movies on 8-mm to digital sound, because AFM Stereo is no worse.
His mention of digital audio either indicates that AFM Stereo was not available in 1986 when first movies were released on 8 mm, or that he was simply hyping up digital. I wonder whether it is the former, and if yes, when AFM Stereo became available.
Yeah, I've read wikipedia and even added some of my own to it
A quick aside regarding Kodak's first 8-mm camcorder: Kodak was just riding the 8-mm train. I suppose Kodak wanted to move from Super 8 to 8-mm video, the number clicked nicely in the heads of its marketing people. But Kodak did not have anything of its own. The development was spearheaded by the Japanese and Philips. Tape was developed by Fuji and TDK. Kodak's camcorder was made by Matsushita. Kodak simply bought a product made in Japan and branded it "Kodak". I guess Kodak people wanted to sell the same stuff for twenty years like they did with film - this did not work with video, not to mention that Kodak's camcorder was outdated, having vacuum pickup tube instead of a CCD. In just a year Sony released a CCD-based Handicam, then started improving the format with AFM Stereo, PCM audio, Hi-Band video. Kodak did nothing of that, and Matshushita did not feel following Sony either, because Matsushita was pushing [S]VHS-C together with JVC. And this is how Kodak failed miserably. Kodak made its last movie camera in 1982. Meh.
Anyway, I am still in the dark regarding AFM Stereo. I guess I need to go through 1980s video magazines in hope for clues.