• kadu@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    Also, it’s a well-known fact that Betamax was a higher quality recording format, where VHS was a less quality but longer recording time format.

    That’s the point: this information is wrong, but widely believed.

    Betamax didn’t sacrifice recording time for quality - it sacrificed spool size. The quality is the same as VHS.

    Betacam was Sony’s tape recoding format with actual quality improvements over VHS, but it was never sold as a household product.

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
      11·
      1 year ago

      As someone who owned a professional Sony Betamax machine, I disagree.

      You can have that machine record at the highest quality setting that a VHS macjine couldn’t match, at least not until the very end of the production cycle war, when they added another mode to some VHS macjines for the higher quality but the shorter recording time.

      It was a marketing ploy, it was the battle of quality versus quantity. And quantity won.