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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

Let me blow your mind: Betamax was not better quality than VHS. There are many things that can explain why people believed that one was better than the other.

People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality.

People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability.

People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.

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How do you quantify quality?

"When Betamax was introduced in Japan and the United States in 1975, its Beta I speed of 1.57 inches per second (ips) offered a higher horizontal resolution (approximately 250 lines vs 240 lines horizontal NTSC), lower video noise, and less luma/chroma crosstalk than VHS, and was later marketed as providing pictures superior to VHS's playback. However, the introduction of Beta II speed, 0.79 ips (two-hour mode), to compete with VHS's two-hour Standard Play mode (1.31 ips) reduced Betamax's horizontal resolution to 240 lines.[7]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war#Picture_q...

by measuring signal fidelity?

Looking at it. Which is what really matters.

If you want to collect obsolete formats and you have a TV with analog inputs VHS is probably your best thing to get into. This place

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114286077399818803

sells VHS decks for $12 and you can get pretty good movies for $2. Contrast that to compact cassette decks which start at twice that and have a good chance of being non-functional. That place has the complete works of Barbara Streisand but if you want music that anybody would want on cassettes the sky is the limit for collectables.

My impression is that the quality of VHS isn't terrible. The video is worse than DVD of course but a lot of DVDs have NERFed soundtracks because they mixed them assuming you're going to play their 5.1 mix on a 2-channel system. Any deck you get now is going to support VHS Hi-Fi and if you have a 5.1 system with some kind of Dolby Pro Logic the soundtrack of a good VHS can be better than the soundtrack of an average DVD. (Blu-Ray often has better sound not because the technology is better but because the 5.1 soundtrack is more likely to really be a 5.1 soundtrack)

There are a few more things I didn't like about DVD, I don't like the blocky artifacts that you often see in the background (doors, bookcases, etc). Some of the earlier scenes in The Matrix are particularly bad. Fire/explosions are also very poor.

Beyond this, is when they bake a 16:9 movie into the 4:3 format losing significant fidelity. Batman Begins was nearly unwatchable.

This of course doesn't get into the sound quality/mixing issues you mention... I wish they had something closer to h.265 at that time, as I don't mind a blurry background nearly as much as blotchy/blocky artifacts for similar sizes or smaller. A 2gb h.265 movie from blueray looks dramatically better than a 4+gb DVD movie.

> This place sells VHS decks for $12

> Any deck you get now is going to support VHS Hi-Fi

When you say "VHS deck", do you mean something other than a VCR?

In tests done by Technology Connections, the difference was so small as to be inconsequential. It was technically better at its slowest speed, but you could barely perceive the difference and more importantly Sony disabled the feature in the vast majority of machines sold. People wanted more than 60 minutes out of one tape. They wanted 2 hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA

Sony charging exorbitant licensing fees to manufacturers of Betamax equipment also didn't help, a lesson it took Sony a few more decades and proprietary formats to finally learn.

The real beta killer feature was that VHS extended recording mode could fit an entire NFL game on a single tape.

Betamax's "Standard" playback was better than VHS's "standard" playback... the issue was VHS "standard" could get something like 2 hours to a typical tape and BetaMax was like half an hour. For actual content, BetaMax tapes were recorded in an extended play format, while most VHS tapes were in Standard. This dramatically reduced BetaMax quality to be comparable or worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyKRubB5N60

We started with a Betamax player. I think one underappreciated reason for VHS's win was that you could put a movie on one VHS tape, whereas the Betamax required two (at least at the time it mattered). And in an era of movie rental stores, that made a difference. Both in terms of logistics, but also in terms of the consumer having to load a new tape halfway through a movie.

A classic case of completely ignoring UX. UX beats technical merits, every single time.

They were both terrible quality. The thing with VHS is playtime. One movie could fit onto one tape.

Laserdisc also had that annoyance; max duration about an hour per side.

The only real advantage VHS had was that JVC broadly licensed the tech so anyone could manufacture devices and/or tapes while Sony heavily restricted Beta.

Porn went VHS and later on you could fit a whole movie on one cassette.

That was it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVVAQVdEOs => (false, true)

This is discussed and dismissed in the first paragraph of the article.

I'm not entirely sure that the blog is totally correct in this part. I've always been fascinated by censorship (especially when it comes to movies/entertainment) and have seen/read a bunch of stuff about vhs in the 80's. Here in the UK we had a term, 'video nasties' for a bunch of horror films that were banned (Evil Dead being a very prominent example). Anyway, the general concensus I've always been under after watching/reading all the documentaries about that stuff is that the reason why the porn industry used vhs and ultimately won the format war was because the prudish japanese execs at the sony would not alow 'smut' on their precious new format and if the industry could not license the use of that format then they had to use vhs. The porn industry didn't choose vhs over betamax, vhs was the only option available to it.

Yep, it was Sony policing the content on their media - a story as old as time.

It's (a part of) what killed MiniDisc too. It was _the_ coolest format ever invented, but Sony gatekeeped it so hard nobody used it.

Nothing more Cyberdeck-y than using a MD to transfer data :)

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