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

My family got a Beta for Christmas around 1984.All of those rental stores began to appear with new releases every week and we recorded plenty too from tv.I am not sure the exact year but when VHS dropped in price we bought one.

 

That looks like one of the ones we had! My dad bought our first VCR in late 77 or 78 and it was an RCA, but it was stolen in a burglary. He used the insurance money to buy a new one and I'm pretty sure it was the same one you had.

When my dad passed awhile back, I found several old VHS tapes. There were a couple of things that he had kept from the 70s/early 80s, but most of the tapes had newer stuff, including a bunch of CBS Evening News and MacNeil/Lehrer Reports. The older stuff did look pretty good after 25 or so years.

Did pick up a couple of Beta machines in the early 2000s and a couple of boxes worth of used tapes. Still need to go through some of them to see if there is anything worth digitizing.

 

Video 2000.

 

Betamax sl-25.

Louder than a truck loading and ejecting. Great picture.

 

Sounds like fun, you might find a few surprises.

 

I started with laserdisc. My player was a Pioneer LD660. My first set of laserdiscs were: ABBA (Music Videos) / Olivia (TV Special) / Olivia:
Physical (Music Videos) / Grease (Movie). I also had a few demo laserdiscs (One with Mr. Wizard, one with DEVO, & others with samples of
video clips of movies.).

 

I've found a few, like a 30 minute special/infomercial on Rocky 3, a full episode of Entertainment Tonight, part of a Friday Night Videos episode, but also a lot of movies taped off HBO with really low volumes and the credits cut off.

 

VHS

 

this was my first Hi-Fi VCR it was quite expensive and built like tank,,,mostly metal. LOVED IT!

 

Yep. I had a Panasonic Hi-Fi stereo VHS deck too, one of the very first released. It had an MTS tuner, too, so I could watch THE GOLDEN GIRLS and THE TONIGHT SHOW with stereo sound. I think those were the first two show to do stereo broadcasts. The hi-fi stereo played back prerecorded movies with that system too, and it was far better than the linear stereo that had come before. In fact, audiophile types started latching onto the hi-fi stereo system as a great way of capturing just stereo audio, and you could get six full hours on a tape.

And yes, it was built like a tank. Mine had a silver finish. But it expired a long time ago.

 

This was my first and I still have it. I paid 500 bones for this thing in the nineties.

 

(not my photo, this is from an ebay auction)

My first home video player was a Panasonic PV1200 which I bought in mid-1980. Mono audio but surprisingly decent video quality for early VHS. It was a tank and I think it weighed about 25lbs and had twist-dials to change channels and had a timer function to record up to 24 hours(wow!) in advance. When I bought it, pre-recorded VHS tapes where just starting to become available and would routinely cost about $90-$100+ a movie. If I recall correctly, my first few VHS movies were Close Encounters Of The 3rd Kind, Jaws and The Thing. I'd say 95% of my use was recording stuff off ONTV, one of the first subscription services. Within a year or two, terrible quality bootleg screen-shot videos of unreleased movies became a big deal, having E.T. and Star Wars long before they ever were officially released was a major thing.

In 1981, I bought my first Laserdisc player, a Sylvania VP-7200 top-loader which was a gigantic leap forward in a/v quality.

 

Excellent system. My friend had the grundig 2x4. Double sided tapes and perfect still frames. High quality PQ too.

 

It wasnt that. Beta failed due to Sonys arrogance.
And just like today, people wanted cheap cheap cheap.
Today people stream even though its substandard. Why? Because its cheap.
Nothing has changed.

 

Technically, "my first" was a b-&-w Ampex portable videotape setup we used in high school, where I was in the A-V department. Can't locate a pic, but it was a 1" reel-and-takeup situation, with a deck you could haul out, a battery pack you plugged into it, and a "small" camera you could shoulder. This would have been 1970, when we got a new high school with all the trick and trimmings. We used it for marching band practice, and shared with the football and basketball teams.

And, to make enough dough to afford my own VCR, I sold RCA CED disk players in the Electronics department at JC Penney.

Later on of course, it was VHS for me, and my whole family used VHS. My wife's family was all Beta, so had the Hoffman Board been around at the time, I'm sure we would have never gotten married.

 

[QUOTE="Partyslammer, post: 2958252
Within a year or two, terrible quality bootleg screen-shot videos of unreleased movies became a big deal, having E.T. and Star Wars long before they ever were officially released was a major thing.[/QUOTE]

Back in 1981, one of my dad's coworkers got a copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark about 6 months after it came out. His work had a couple of VCRs, so he made a copy for us. The quality was really good, it looked like someone had taped it off tv, and I was able to get another copy made to trade with someone who had Empire Strikes Back. Was super excited to see Empire again, but the quality was horrible, weird zooms, washed out video, pretty much unwatchable.