Betamax
Betamax is a discontinued consumer analog videocassette recording format developed by Sony. It was one of the main competitors in the videotape format war against its primary rival, VHS. Betamax was introduced in Japan on May 10, 1975, and launched in the United States later that year.
Betamax was widely regarded, in part due to Sony's marketing, as offering superior picture quality compared to VHS. Its initial β1 speed provided 250 horizontal lines of resolution, compared to VHS's 240 lines, but early Beta tapes were limited to 60 minutes of recording time, making them impractical for recording movies or sporting events. To address this, Sony introduced the β2 speed, which doubled recording time to two hours but reduced resolution, negating its technical advantage.
VHS's commercial success over Betamax was also driven by JVC's strategy of licensing the format broadly, spurring competition and lowering prices among manufacturers. In contrast, Sony initially resisted licensing Beta, limiting its market reach. By the late 1980s, Betamax’s decline was evident, and in 1988 Sony tacitly acknowledged defeat when it announced it would add VHS models to its videocassette recorder lineup.
Despite losing the format war, Sony continued producing Betamax recorders until August 2002 and sold blank Beta cassettes until March 2016, marking the end of the format’s commercial lifespan.
Original version
Launch and early models
The first Betamax VCR introduced in the United States was the LV-1901 model, which included a Trinitron television, and appeared in stores in early November 1975. The cassettes contain videotape in a design similar to that of the earlier, professional, U-matic format.Like the rival videotape format VHS, Betamax has no guard band and uses azimuth recording to reduce crosstalk. According to Sony's history webpages, the name had a double meaning: beta is the Japanese word used to describe the way in which signals are recorded on the tape; and the shape of the lowercase Greek letter beta resembles the course of the tape through the transport. The suffix -max, from the word "maximum", was added to suggest greatness. In 1977, Sony issued the first long-play Betamax VCR, the SL-8200. This VCR had two recording speeds: normal, and the newer half speed. This provided two hours of recording on
the L-500 Beta videocassette. The SL-8200 was to compete against the VHS VCRs, which allowed up to 4, and later 6 and 8, hours of recording on one cassette.
Initially, Sony was able to tout several Betamax-only features, such as BetaScan—a high-speed picture search in either direction—and BetaSkipScan, a technique that allowed the operator to see where they were on the tape by pressing the FF key : the transport would switch into the BetaScan mode until the key was released. This feature is discussed in more detail on Peep Search. Sony believed that the M-Load transports used by VHS machines made copying these trick modes impossible. BetaSkipScan is now available on miniature M-load formats, but even Sony was unable to fully replicate this on VHS. BetaScan was originally called "Videola" until the company that made the Moviola threatened legal action.
Sanyo marketed its own Betamax-compatible recorders under the Betacord brand. In addition to Sony and Sanyo, Beta-format video recorders were manufactured and sold by Toshiba, Pioneer, Murphy, Aiwa, and NEC. Zenith Electronics and WEGA contracted with Sony to produce VCRs for their product lines. The department stores Sears and Quelle sold Beta-format VCRs under their house brands, as did the RadioShack chain of electronic stores.
Industrial and professional usage
Sony also offered a range of industrial Betamax products, a Beta I-only format for industrial and institutional users. These were aimed at the same market as U-Matic equipment, but were cheaper and smaller. The arrival of Betacam reduced the demand for both industrial Beta and U-Matic equipment.For the professional and broadcast video industry, Sony derived Betacam from Betamax. Released in 1982, Betacam became the most widely used videotape format in electronic news gathering, replacing the wide U-matic tape format. Betacam and Betamax are similar in some ways- early versions of Betacam used the same videocassette shape, used the same oxide tape formulation with the same coercivity, and recorded linear audio tracks in the same location of the tape. However, in the key area of video recording, Betacam and Betamax use completely different on-tape formats.
Betamax also had a significant part to play in the music recording industry, when Sony introduced its pulse-code modulation digital recording system as an encoding box/PCM adaptor that connected to a Betamax recorder. The Sony PCM-F1 adaptor was sold with a companion Betamax VCR SL-2000 as a portable digital audio recording system. Many recording engineers used this system in the 1980s and 1990s to make their first digital master recordings. Later models using the same format included the Sony PCM-501ES, PCM-601ES and PCM-701ES.
Court case
One other major consequence of the Betamax technology's introduction to the U.S. was the lawsuit Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, with the U.S. Supreme Court determining home videotaping to be legal in the United States, wherein home videotape cassette recorders were a legal technology since they had substantial noninfringing uses. This precedent was later invoked in MGM v. Grokster, where the high court agreed that the same "substantial noninfringing uses" standard applies to authors and vendors of peer-to-peer file sharing software.Later developments and offshoots
HiFi audio upgrade
In June 1983, Sony introduced high fidelity audio to videotape as Beta Hi-Fi. For NTSC, Beta HiFi worked by placing a pair of FM carriers between the chroma and luminance carriers, a process known as frequency multiplexing. Each head had a specific pair of carriers; in total, four individual channels were employed. Head A recorded its hi-fi carriers at 1.38 and 1.68 MHz, and the B head employed 1.53 and 1.83 MHz. The result was audio with an 80 dB dynamic range, with less than 0.005% wow and flutter.Prior to the introduction of Beta Hi-Fi, Sony shifted the Y carrier up by 400 kHz to make room for the four FM carriers that would be needed for Beta Hi-Fi. All Beta machines incorporated this change, plus the ability to hunt for a lower frequency pre-AFM Y carrier. Sony incorporated an "antihunt" circuit, to stop the machine hunting for a Y carrier that was not there.
Some Sony NTSC models were marketed as "Hi-Fi Ready". These Betamax decks looked like a regular Betamax model, except for a special 28-pin connector on the rear. If the user desired a Beta Hi-Fi model but lacked the funds at the time, he could purchase an "SL-HFRxx" and at a later date purchase the separate Hi-Fi Processor. Sony offered two outboard Beta Hi-Fi processors, the HFP-100 and HFP-200. They were identical except that the HFP-200 was capable of multi-channel TV sound, with the word "stereocast" printed after the Beta Hi-Fi logo. This was possible because unlike a VHS Hi-Fi deck, an NTSC Betamax did not need an extra pair of heads. The HFP-x00 would generate the needed carriers which would be recorded by the attached deck, and during playback, the AFM carriers would be passed to the HFP-x00. They also had a small "fine tracking" control on the rear panel for difficult tapes.
For PAL, however, the bandwidth between the chroma and luminance carriers was not sufficient to allow additional FM carriers, so depth multiplexing was employed, wherein the audio track would be recorded in the same way that the video track was. The lower-frequency audio track was written first by a dedicated head, and the video track recorded on top by the video head. The head disk had an extra pair of audio-only heads with a different azimuth, positioned slightly ahead of the regular video heads, for this purpose.
Sony was confident that VHS could not achieve the same audio performance feat as Beta Hi-Fi. However, to the chagrin of Sony, JVC did develop a VHS hi-fi system on the principle of depth multiplexing approximately a year after the first Beta Hi-Fi VCR, the SL-5200 was introduced by Sony. Despite initial praise as providing "CD sound quality", both Beta Hi-Fi and VHS HiFi suffered from "carrier buzz", where high-frequency information bled into the audio carriers, creating momentary "buzzing" and other audio flaws. Both systems also used companding noise-reduction systems, which could create "pumping" artifacts under some conditions. Both formats also suffered from interchange problems, where tapes made on one machine did not always play back well on other machines. When this happened and if the artifacts became too distracting, users were forced to revert to the old linear soundtrack.