Quote:
Originally Posted by cjacek
Thanks Tom. I'm embarrassed to say that the only Sony Beta that I do have, it's got record problems - I only found out later when I spent tons of time changing all belts, idlers and cleaning it up. Mechanics work but it's got electronic problems. I'm at the point where not only don't I want another early Sony but I'm probably gonna give this one away. But the point is that I've heard some people echo what you said that the Sanyos indeed have better reliability. Can you talk a little about the built quality of these Sanyos? And what is it about the SuperBeta that interests you? I must say I've also been looking into those. Thanks for your time.
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I've never had to open mine (they just worked as found, and 2 were the same model) so I don't know about the insides. One was a late top loader, the others were basic monophonic front loaders. They had good heft and felt like there was a good bit of metal in them.
SuperBeta and Super VHS both did the same thing to double the monochrome resolution so that you could resolve ~400 monochrome lines VS the normal ~200...Detail is noticeably better on tapes of both formats. AFAIK there were no official superbeta movie releases (and VERY limited on VHS if any). A super deck will play tapes recorded on a normal deck*, but it doesn't work the other way around (except for VHS decks that are labeled SQPB) since they changed the video carrier freq.
Color resolution (which was well below NTSC broadcast levels in both formats) was never addressed in either super formats and is the same as regular decks...Some critics complained (and you can say both are noticeably inferior to LD on color resolution) about color resolution not being addressed in the super formats...Granted human eyes see more monochrome detail than color so improving monochrome resolution was the best to pick if you are only going to improve one. Beta actually LISTENED to the complaints and released EDBetamax which was SuperBeta with improved chroma resolution (which made it incompatible with superbeta IIRC)....But ED beta came out AFTER beta had squarely lost the format war so they are rare and pricey even compared to SuperBeta.
At some point I need to make a recording on my SuperBeta and see how good it looks. I bought it to add to my obsolete recording formats collection a couple of years after I stopped timeshifting on tape.
*as well as super tapes obviously.