A series of idiotic ideas have been detailed in a book, History’s Worst Inventions.
on 07/14/2009 at 05:30 AM
Yes you are right about betammax, it was far better, smaller tapes and better picture, it rewound without unloading the heads and gave a good still frame with one head. VHS was crap one reason was the work arounds to get round sony patents (just like windows) but it was marketed better so it won, sort of like obama!
Posted by Chris Edwards
07/14/2009 at 07:12 AM
And most television production groups used Beta for years until the far-superior digital formats arrived and became cheap. However, I think that the feature of not unloading the heads for rewinding was probably a bad thing, because it caused lots of extra wear on the heads. We had a Beta VCR (Sanyo, I think) and it wore out pretty quickly because it didn’t unload the tape from the heads.
In the UK the TV production companies used Sony U-matics, betamax was a consumer version. The deal on not unloading the heads was that the design pulled in a thin layer of air (maybe a sony patent) and there was no wear. Somehow it also recorded more information on a smaller tape. The opposite happened recently with blueray, this is a supereor format but the dark empire backed the other side, fortunately sony own some big studios (it was film availiability that won it for VHS, does VHS strand for very horrid system?) so sony and Apple won this one.
Posted by Chris Edwards
07/14/2009 at 05:59 PM
07/14/2009 at 11:25 AM
