[ARC Tech-109]

No SuperBeta and BetaED all retained the same BII/III speeds for record, only the luma deviation was pushed up and the color remained the same. I have a SuperBeta and there's no BI recording speed, there may have been an oddball deck with a BI that I'm not aware of, the SLO series of "pro" decks had some BI like the SLO-380-something which was like a psudo editor but these were in the Betamax family. SuperBeta and BetaED used thinner head profiles with narrower gaps on metal formula tapes to achieve the higher bandwidth in the consumer market, the tape was already available from the BetacamSP arena and I believe there was a model with a thumbwheel jog/shuttle but nothing frame accurate. Betacam had already established itself in the pro markets so there was no reason to augment with the color under format.
Pro decks run at the higher speeds primarly for the stability and lower S/N, tape use is of secondary concern. A high rating station with a big budget isn't going to care about tape use, they're not going to compromise their ratings on a poor picture. Joe Consumer doesn't buy his Beta L830 tapes by the pallet load and could care less about the sparkly details of the actresses hair, the niche-nerd like myself is going to look for that obscure oddball machine with the belief that it must be "better"... only to find out it's little more than a glorified consumer model with BNC connectors.

You definitely get two thumbs up for the historical production on the Pro format wars of the 1980's. I do remember some of the propaganda on the MII format from around 1985/86 and while some of the technical aspects of the format were superior to the BetacamSP format it wasn't enough to win and despite the NBC commitment to the MII format they eventually went BetacamSP.

I got my first VTR when I was 13, a Panasonic NV-3120 EIAJ open-reel and it came with a metal cabinet RCA Nuvister Color with the A/V jackfield on the rear. I worked well enough to get me hooked on the obscure and about a year later I scored a pile of Sony SL series top loaders from the local TV repair shop, it was then I learned Sony made their sub-models similar to the then popular Plymouth K-Car by mixing & matching this and that before adding the fancy decorations to the cabinet. When I was done doing my own I had a Franken-Beta with all the cool buttons and manual audio control with a real meter. That next spring I bought a new-in-the-box Sanyo VCR-7250 SuperBeta HiFi on a blow-out sale for $99.00 (this was 1985) and have owned it ever since. Picture to me was so-so but the audio was something else and for this reason alone I kept it around. I'm still hooked on the open-reel 40 years later and have a Sony BVH-2000 in my living room feeding my Samsung plasma.