Poll – What was your first? Beta, VHS, other?

My first was VHS and I love it!

I wanna get a videodisc player! (MONO) I have 1 movie (Poltergeist)

 

One thing not mentioned was that Alfred Hitchcock died right around the time VHS was hitting critical mass.
He had kept many of his classic hidden in a vault for decades....including Vertigo.
Timed with his death, Vertigo was released on home video....so when I was watching Vertigo for the first time I was watching it along with my dad.
A special moment in retrospect.

 

My first VHS player which I shared with my girlfriend now wife back in 1985 was a Sansui. It was a big deal back then to have a player and rent a tape at one of those mom n pops at that time on a Saturday night.

When we married a few years later we upgraded to a Panasonic.

 

Same one I had. We called it the PlaySkool VCR. Wired remote...

 

Wow she looks awesome!!!!

Was it only Mono playback?

 

Until the middle of 2006 I was still buying and renting VHS tapes. Then I got on the DVD bandwagon when I realized less and less brand new movies were coming to VHS and have been using DVDs ever since.

 

My grandfather got me a Sanyo betamax for my 21st birthday. I then went on to Sony beta hifi.
The beta hifi was a beauty. I could record TV simulcasts in stereo. So gigs like pink floyd live at Knebworth were recorded in genuine hifi quality. The video quality was way above VHS. I also used to record cd's onto video tape and play them back in hifi quality.
My best mate had a £700 VHS player at the same time. I was stunned by its PQ. Compared to the beta it was absolutely awful.
Another mate had the grundig 2x4 System. That was so good with perfect still frame. And you could record on both sides of the tape.
Sonys arrogance killed betamax.
History has consistently shown that consumers aren't interested in the best quality. Hence so many high quality technologies failing.
Eventually I had a VHS when the Sony packed in.
Then along came hdd recorders. I had a wonderful Panasonic hdd recorder. Still got it somewhere.

 

VHS - my father was a teacher and brought home a VCR (probably a Magnavox, it was over 40 years ago) from school that was broken. He got it repaired and my siblings and I would tape movies off of HBO, which we got for free, being a test market. My friends and I would come home from school for lunch in high school and watch 30 minute bits of The Warriors. By the end of they year , we knew all of the dialogue, can you dig it.

 

Betamax was vasty superior to VHS. I suppose that also makes me a snob. And proudly so.
No apologies though for being honest.

 

Beta.

The funny thing is: the video cassette industry outlived most beta machines, so when your betamax couldn't survive another trip to the service centre, your only choice was to take a step backwards to VHS.

 

I thought it was beyond dispute that Beta had the better quality. It was just the loser in the format wars due to VHS being so much more readily available.

 

I started buying Betamax tapes before I could afford a player. By the time I could afford a player, the format was dead.
Not my finest experience with home entertainment technology.

 

VHS for me. RCA circa 1977. I loved watching the previous night's SNL on Sunday morning. This pic brings back many fond memories, mechanical tuner and all.

 

Some time ago we visited a house my wife listed for sale. The owners had cleaned a bunch of junk which was sitting out front on the street. Amongst that stuff was what must have been 300 RCA-CED discs. Movies, musicals, concerts....maybe everything ever issued in that format. Here was an early adopter who bought in big time.

Can you imagine? Discs read by a stylus! A system doomed to failure.

 

My Dad picked up the Panasonic version that looked like this. PV-1000. It had SP/LP mode. No hi-fi audio. Piano punch and clunk key control. Was working when retired from service.
I remember everyone having their own individual tape to use for record. Tapes were expensive. So was the recorder. I ended up working in tv...now I hardly ever watch it. Music is where I want to be.

 

That RCA VCR of mine was indeed built by Panasonic.

 

Whenever the subject comes up people always say Beta was better than VHS. I always ask "Why is that?" Their faces go blank and they sometimes will mumble something about picture quality.

It is true that at the two format's original recording speeds (βI vs. SP), Beta did yield slightly better resolution...5% at best. Does anybody think that anyone with an average 25" television of the day could see the difference? I think not.

Back at that time there were two concerns that tipped in VHS's favor. First was record time. Panasonic/RCA/Quasar et.al. had just introduced the slower LP record speed which yielded 4 hours on a standard T-120 cassette. Sony eventually introduced the slower βII speed which still only gave 3 hours (on a standard L-750 cassette), but they were late. Just when the market was heating up consumers were faced with a choice of up to 4hr recording vs. Beta's 90 minute. The second reason was that VHS machines were simply cheaper to make, so much so that it was easy for VHS licensees to seriously undercut Beta prices and still make money.

 

Beta
VHS
Laser
DVD
Blu-ray
4k
Now I just stream. Have almost 300 titles in my library. Have kept only 50-60 discs.
Life is much simpler

 

Not only was my first deck a Betamax, I sold Beta decks to all of my family, a fact they'd mention to me every time they could. It was never complimentary.

 

My dad worked for Motorola, and had access to things prior to them being introduced to the market. Interestingly enough, they were not Motorola branded products. One of the things he brought home in the beginning of 1977 was an early prototype recorder, that was similar to closed circuit TV or whatever those things were called. I was recording TV shows before the first Betamax. That was the next thing he brought home, the big combination Betamax and TV. Weighed a ton but was easier to record programs. I still have a bunch of those tapes. That first recorder I had up until 2017; we were in the middle of moving and some things had to go, and that was one of them. I still have pang of regret about that.

 

VHS. The "remote" was actually plugged into the front of the unit with a long chord!

 

VHS, around 1985. I remember recording Live Aid in July 85. Unfortunately it was not HiFi, so crappy mono sound. I got into Beta in the early 90s for trading PCM audio, still have a Sony PCM F1, but no working Beta deck at this point. All the Beta tapes have been transferred to the computer. Also found a Toshiba VHS VCR the had a built in PCM encoder, up to 6 hours of digital audio on a tape. I think it was 14 bit rather than 16 bit, but that was fine for FM. See my avatar.

 

VHS

I always wanted to get one of those 5CD carousels that also played LD, but never did.

 

1982 - ßetamax
1985 - ßeta Hi-Fi
1988 - Superßeta, S-VHS, Laserdisc
1990 - Hi-Band Superßeta, multistandard monitor, multistandard VHS
1993 - stopped watching television
2000 - DVD
2021 - HD streaming

I still have the S-VHS and Hi-Band Superßeta decks. The S-VHS cost $1299 and had all manner of digital effects in it - strobing, PinP, pixel and palette effects. I waited until this format was developed to bother with VHS. The detail that S-VHS captured was miles better than straight VHS, but the chroma was still a little mushy as VHS always had. The 15th anniversary ßetamax that Sony brought out in 1990 for the faithful was insane! $1599, and the return of ßeta Is speed for the utmost quality.

It could achieve frame-accurate insert editing with its multiple heads. I would generally record from cable to the S-VHS [since the cable was medium resolution at best] then dub down to ßeta Is for my music video reels which displayed no 2nd gen artifacts. The last time I used the beta [2018] it was working fine. The remote on that unit was like getting an iPhone sent back through a time machine 17 years! No physical buttons. Just a dozen+ levels of backlit, flatscreen LCD contextual UI to control every function. Okay, so it was a 1-bit display, but that was the only thing not mind-stunning about it.

I had lusted after laserdisc since 1982. By 1988 I felt the time was nigh, with income levels to support the price of software. I still have hundreds of LDs. treasure my hundred+ Japanese music LDs. If you wanted the best that TV could offer from 1978-1997, LD was your format. When a power issue following a hurricane killed my LD player [the stupid power company linemen didn't ground us when they hooked us back to the mains!] in 2004, I bought a late model industrial kiosk unit on eBay that still works great! It's also a better CD player than the DVD which is a piece of junk.

I'm on my third DVD unit as they don't last long with poor build quality. The current one inserts a half second of dead air in-between CD tracks. Cutting out the first split second of every track and killing any disc with segues or live albums! But the current multistandard DVD player does output flawless PAL-NTSC conversion to the TV with zero issues.

Since music video was my main thing, I finally bought multistandard equipment in 1990. I could now buy PAL VHS music videos that didn't make the leap to Japanese laserdisc. I need a multistandard [Sony 27"] monitor to go with the multistandard VCR since the latter back in that time, just would playback a signal in NTSC/SECAM/PAL. it didn't convert on the fly. The multistandard VHS [a Hitachi] was a TOTAL LEMON. It was in the shop under warranty for at least two of the first four years I owned it. A disgrace. So I was mostly unable to actually USE it!

I was not an early adopter to DVD. I waited until they finished their shakedown cruise, as I was not impressed by the first generation of playback. I remember some really shaky mastering of some titles. I finally bought a region-free, multistandard DVD player and started buying DVDs in 2000. But I never bought DVDs at the levels of consumption that I had with LDs. By that time, I had moved away from my friends, so no more groovy movie nights as I was the guy with the big movie collection. I felt that money spent on DVDs was better spent on music. I might now have as many or slightly more DVDs than LDs after 22 years. We only pick them up cheaply if we see something good.

Since I stopped watching any TV in 1993, I kept the 27" CRT until it died after about 15 years. I replaced it with a friend's 27" CRT who had moved to flatscreen HD. Which, back in the late 80s, I was waiting and waiting for. I was a reader of The Perfect Vision magazine, the video analog to The Absolute Sound magazine. But by 1993, I was off that treadmill. Flatscreen HD existed for a decade or more and I could have cared less. Still no Blu-Ray, and we only watched DVDs.

The last few years have seen streaming eat into theatrical distribution. I like going to the cinema, but more, and more films were getting snapped up by Netflix for distribution, and then they started bankrolling movies we wanted to see without putting them on DVD. So when Covid-19 hit, my wife finally said we need to get streaming. I bought a used 37" HDTV and an AppleTV4K so we can finally see things. Not too impressed with Netflix. Everything I think I might want to see there and search for is not available. The streaming space is balkanizing down to each studio's app and their respective catalog. Untenable for me. Personally, I don't like watching TV for more than a film a week. Two at most. More than three hours sitting in front of a screen seems like a waste of life to me.

I could have been listening to music!

 

Quasar VHS in 1980. Working three jobs, and wasn't home enough to keep tabs on shows. First two series I "binged" on were syndicated runs of Barney Miller and Rockford Files.

The guy in the mall I bought it from, offered to sell me some "custom-made" adult tapes. My first thought was, geez, Hollywood features are going for $79 - no way were pervs gonna fork out that kind of money for lower-caliber products...

I "may" have read the marketplace wrong...