Sony Dynamicron L-750 U.H.G. video tapes

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

Nobody really wanted to record in BII anyway once the faster speeds were out since the recording time it allowed was so short.

BIII (and VHS EP/SLP) is actually -slower- than BI or BII. The easy way to remember this is, "How long will the tape run before it hits its end?".

I rarely ever used the BIII speed (and I made very few recordings on any VHS machines I ever had, but certainly only at SP on those). SP and BI or BII were just reasonably acceptable for video viewing but the slow speeds were almost always lousy. Super VHS on a good machine may be an exception; when I got my HR-S9900U VCR, I did try Super-VHS EP speed and it did look pretty decent if I remember right.

It always amused (or annoyed) me that people would use the EP/SLP VHS speed and cram three movies on to one video cassette. When I got my first VCR, a Sony SL-7200 in 1979, recording one movie from a TV channel (such as "Jaws" when it was first broadcast) required two L-500 tapes at US$16 each, a full day's pay for me at that time for one movie. So, ten years later, I could not understand anyone who was so cheap as to think "I do not want to spend two whole dollars (the cost of a VHS tape then) to record a movie, so I will pick this lousy quality and have to fast-forward through two movies, so I can save $1.33". Yecch!

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by ChrisW6ATV

BIII (and VHS EP/SLP) is actually -slower- than BI or BII. The easy way to remember this is, "How long will the tape run before it hits its end?".

I rarely ever used the BIII speed (and I made very few recordings on any VHS machines I ever had, but certainly only at SP on those). SP and BI or BII were just reasonably acceptable for video viewing but the slow speeds were almost always lousy. Super VHS on a good machine may be an exception; when I got my HR-S9900U VCR, I did try Super-VHS EP speed and it did look pretty decent if I remember right.

It always amused (or annoyed) me that people would use the EP/SLP VHS speed and cram three movies on to one video cassette. When I got my first VCR, a Sony SL-7200 in 1979, recording one movie from a TV channel (such as "Jaws" when it was first broadcast) required two L-500 tapes at US$16 each, a full day's pay for me at that time for one movie. So, ten years later, I could not understand anyone who was so cheap as to think "I do not want to spend two whole dollars (the cost of a VHS tape then) to record a movie, so I will pick this lousy quality and have to fast-forward through two movies, so I can save $1.33". Yecch!

I meant slower. It's what I get for rushing through posting half the time.

A few shows I did make SP recordings of, but back when I was archiving TV shows to tape my parents were buying the tapes and never wanted to supply me with enough so I always had to get everything I could out of what I got or miss programs (most of what I was interested in was played during sleeping hours). As soon as I got an S-VHS-ET deck I switched to that and didn't look back. EP recordings were better than SP on a regular deck.
Memory be it analog or digital is never cheap or plentiful enough until after it's thoroughly obsolete.

[B 4204 T3]

The results are in!



Yesterday, I had some time to make a few brief test recordings on one of these bad Sony Betamax video tapes, which was blank at the end. I used both tape speeds & both video modes, standard & Super Beta. Unfortunately, the new recordings were just as bad as the rest of the tapes just like it. I tried adjusting the tracking knob, but it didn't do any good. The video quality was so poor that it barely showed up on my TV, but the audio was still decent, just like the rest of the Sony Dynamicron Ultra High Grade tapes I have. Now, I don't know what to do with these tapes or if there's any hope for them. I've heard about the "sticky shed syndrome" issue, but I'm not really knowledgeable about it, and I've never tried to repair a tape with this problem.



Since we're discussing the tape speeds, I'm curious about why Sony discontinued the Beta I speed & made all of their customers settle for the two slower speeds on their VCRs. It seems to me like it wouldn't have done any harm to keep the Beta I speed, and it would have given everyone better picture quality, which is what people wanted. Perhaps if it was still available on all of the Betamax VCRs, then things could have been different in the competition between Sony & JVC for which tape format would win; who knows.

[ARC Tech-109]

Because it was Sony and they do what they want. Betamax was their own and not subject to outsiders or their input. They didn't think anyone would top AFM stereo audio or Betascan & Betaskip, that their video quality didn't warrant the faster BI speed or that VHS would become the defacto home video standard. The Sony arrogance goes way back to before the U-Matic format even hit the drawing board when they thought they would lock in their own take on the EIAJ open reel format.
Sony did however rule the broadcast video world with the Betacam format and that outlived VHS by a decade. The Panasonic MII format video quality was superior to BetacamSP but it never gained the popularity despite being embraced by the ITV, NBC, some PBS and NHK for a time.
Honestly I don't know the *real* reason for the BII/III speeds and I'm sure there's plenty of speculation, I've had many Betamax decks over the years and wondered why myself.

[DVtyro]

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

Because it was Sony and they do what they want. Betamax was their own and not subject to outsiders or their input.

Sony kept BI on SuperBeta, didn't it? Also, Super Hi-Band Beta had BIs speed - what is that, even faster speed?

EDIT: Found in "THE RISE AND FALL OF BETA": "To court the videophile, Sony brought back the BI speed to the consumer format, adding SuperBeta and christening it BI-S." So, the same thing.

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

Sony did however rule the broadcast video world with the Betacam format and that outlived VHS by a decade. The Panasonic MII format video quality was superior to BetacamSP but it never gained the popularity despite being embraced by the ITV, NBC, some PBS and NHK for a time.

I've made a video on the topic: The format war that Beta has won.

[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.

[DVtyro]

Originally Posted by 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

Mr. Betamax's review of the SL-HF3000 reads, "To the right of this is the ON/OFF switch for the s SHB (Super Hi-Band 6.0 MHz) switch. This selection is only functional during recording in BIs."

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

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

I wonder why instead of pushing luma to 500 lines Sony did not stop at the reasonable 400 lines but rather expanded chroma bandwidth - this would have produced a more well rounded format. Was Sony afraid of making a competitor to Betacam?

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

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.

Thanks! I bought a NOS MII tape just for the video, and boy is it ugly. Almost VHS-C ugly. The hubs are different size and are not symmetrical, because Panasonic wanted to keep it compatible with a large VHS-sized cassette, and the small one is inserted sort of to the side, not in the middle. So, there is a ton of unused space on the left side of the cassette. I think they missed it again, making a cassette not much smaller than Beta, and Panasonic switched to U-type loading mechanism, which was larger than M-type. So the whole thing would be almost as large as the previous M-format recorder. Ugh.

Pictures courtesy of Museum of Obsolete Media.

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by B 4204 T3

Unfortunately, the new recordings were just as bad as the rest of the tapes just like it.

The next test would be to play those recordings, and also make new recordings, on a different SuperBeta VCR, if you had access to one. That would tell you if the tape itself was bad, or the first VCR.

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by B 4204 T3

I'm curious about why Sony discontinued the Beta I speed & made all of their customers settle for the two slower speeds on their VCRs.

If you saw my other comment about how so many people (that I knew, at least) would not even use the two-hours-per-tape VHS SP speed, I imagine that far fewer would have used a 1.5-hour-per-tape BI speed (with the most-common L-750 tapes).

[ARC Tech-109]

I can arrange for a SuperBeta recording right off a Type-C, how about an original of "Streets Of Fire" straight from the TBC output? I have plenty of small SP tapes that are doing nothing in the cabinet. This would get you a something from another SuperBeta deck to work with. PM me and maybe we can work something out. I also have Duran Duran Decade and INXS direct from a VIACOM distro.

Pushing the luma was easier than expanding the chroma subcarrier which was at the bottom of the bandspread, expansion would have probably moved it into the sync portion or AFM carriers, all of the hetrodyne downconversions have a limited color resolution be it SVHS, Beta U-Matic or Hi8... just the nature of the beast. There was a lengthy explanation to the downconversion floating about some 20 years ago but I've not been able to find it since google took over the internet.

[DVtyro]

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

Pushing the luma was easier than expanding the chroma subcarrier which was at the bottom of the bandspread, expansion would have probably moved it into the sync portion or AFM carriers

Sure, but since ED Beta was not compable with regular Beta anyway (just like SVHS was not compatible with VHS) why did not they shake it up further? If they doubled the chroma subcarrier, they could have created a decent consumer format comparable to the early Betacam, at least for the first generation of a recording. Maybe this is what they were afraid of, they were protecting their golden Betacam goose.

[ARC Tech-109]

I'm not sure that doubling the color subcarrier would have a marked impact on the color resolution, there is still the overall phase response time that is going to be far slower and slew induced distortions. The actual colorburst of 3.579545 MHZ is the center frequency and it has an overall bandwidth of about 1MHz so knocking this down in the hetrodyne process is going to shrink this as well. Betacam is its own animal and doesn't use any color carriers in the conventional sense, when everything comes together the color bandwidth is about 120 lines in the real world with far less phase error or jitter, I don't see how even an improved down conversion is going to compete but stranger things have happened. The pro broadcast side of Sony was a huge money maker for them and they always met the demands of the buying professionals knowing they had no problem with the pricetag, when a station or the network ratings are on the line money is no object. It must be rugged & reliable on the outside and as accurate as possible on the inside so I would think a "compromise" like a hetrodyne wouldn't be a consideration in the big picture. Just a few degrees of phase error could cause issues with a chroma key so while a TBC can help it won't filter or fix everything.

[DVtyro]

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

I'm not sure that doubling the color subcarrier would have a marked impact on the color resolution, there is still the overall phase response time that is going to be far slower and slew induced distortions. The actual colorburst of 3.579545 MHZ is the center frequency and it has an overall bandwidth of about 1MHz so knocking this down in the hetrodyne process is going to shrink this as well.

Thanks, I probably don't fully understand the intricacies of the system. I thought that doubling color subcarrier will afford twice more bandwidth for color resolution, which would not reach Betacam but would be markedly better than pitiful color resolution across all the color-under formats.

8mm has the highest color subcarrier frequency of them all, and it seems to have made a subtle but noticeable difference:

VHS: 629 kHz
Umatic and Beta: 688 kHz
8mm: 743 kHz

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

Betacam is its own animal and doesn't use any color carriers in the conventional sense, when everything comes together the color bandwidth is about 120 lines in the real world with far less phase error or jitter, I don't see how even an improved down conversion is going to compete but stranger things have happened. The pro broadcast side of Sony was a huge money maker for them and they always met the demands of the buying professionals knowing they had no problem with the pricetag, when a station or the network ratings are on the line money is no object. It must be rugged & reliable on the outside and as accurate as possible on the inside so I would think a "compromise" like a hetrodyne wouldn't be a consideration in the big picture. Just a few degrees of phase error could cause issues with a chroma key so while a TBC can help it won't filter or fix everything.

Yeah, I know that Betacam is different, but it is a fact that some smaller broadcasters used SVHS and Hi8 for daily reporting, and bigger networks used Hi8 footage from places like China and Iraq, ABC used VHS-C camcorders basically as crash cams for POV shots of bobsleigh runs in 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, so a consumer-grade format better than Hi8 would have been appreciated, don't you think?

Michael Rosenblum. a former CBS new s producer, regularly contributes to theMacSeil Lehrer NewsHow, Nighiline, and other new s programs on the
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and British Broadcasting Corporation. He sees hi-8 as the prime acquisition format for the much touted "desktop video" revolution. "I simply couldn't afford Betacam." he says. "And until recently you couldn't get anything accepted on these show s unless it was Beta. My main pitch to clients is a high-quality news product for a fraction of the price. A year ago. nobody wanted to talk to me about hi-8. Now, they're breaking down my door trying to learn about this format. A lot of these network dinosaurs only know how to spend money. The problem is they 're spending themselves out of business. They realize they've got to do something fast, and low-cost video is the answer." - James McBride, 1992

[ARC Tech-109]

Hi8 had some success in the mainstream production, some stations used it for ENG and it was good enough for the TV drama series "Life In The ER" (I think it was) and many of the FOX affiliates used the Sony EVW-300 package or the docked EVV-9000 for the COPS series, it's my understanding they sent the rookies out in the field to shoot the events as most of the time was spent just riding around waiting for the "right" call. I did some of my early interviews using the Canon L2 Hi8 camcorder as it was far easier to set up and not so "intimidating" to some of the talent compared to a full-size ENG package. To them it was a home camcorder and not so formal. Overall the video was about as good as SVHS but it didn't survive a generational chain or editing very well and a good TBC was almost mandatory. Hi8 also had a 400KHz color bandwidth which yielded about 30 horiz lines of resolution. I think the perception of the "better" color was due to many of the recording improvements that were made during the development of the format. My work at the time was very non-technical for a well known drug & alcohol rehab organization and most of it was on the city streets. Lightweight and easy on the batteries were its strong points. The Hi8 tapes were also compatible with my Tascam DA-88 8-ch DAT, this was very handy with boardroom (bored room) meetings where I could mic the major players with bodypacks and keep everything separate should someone go off script. Bland at best but it paid well.

I didn't adopt the early desktop NLE until the Pinnicle Systems Targa-2000Pro came out, most of what was out there at the time was either the consumer grade Matrox capture cards or the Amega Video Toaster. There was an uber-expensive Macintosh based IMIX Video Cube in the mid-90s, it used a proprietary control surface and had a rather "sparkly" quality to the finished video that did a great job of smearing on tape. it had to be calibrated every 8 months and only a few of the staff were allowed to use it... I wasn't one of them so I stuck with tape and got good at it.

[DVtyro]

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

many of the FOX affiliates used the Sony EVW-300 package or the docked EVV-9000 for the COPS series

In 1992 Fox chose SVHS for all its affiliate stations, maybe they later switched to Hi8? IDK.