![VIVA SONY LAND 1980's Betamax Promotional Video [PART 1/2]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110415191944im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/c1dJK4IgDx0/0.jpg "VIVA SONY LAND 1980's Betamax Promotional Video [PART 1/2]")
| Name | Betamax |
|---|---|
| Type | Magnetic tape |
| Owner | Sony |
| Use | Video storage |
| Dimensions | 156 × 96 × 25 mm |
Like the rival videotape format VHS (introduced in October 1977 by JVC), Betamax had no guard band and used azimuth recording to reduce crosstalk. According to Sony's own history webpages, the name came from a double meaning: beta being the Japanese word used to describe the way signals were recorded onto the tape, and from the fact that when the tape ran through the transport, it looked like the Greek letter beta (β). The suffix -max came from "maximum", to suggest greatness.
Sanyo marketed a version as Betacord, but this was also referred to casually as "Beta". In addition to Sony and Sanyo, Beta-format video recorders were also sold by Toshiba, Pioneer, Murphy, Aiwa, and NEC; the Zenith Electronics Corporation and WEGA Corporations contracted with Sony to produce VCRs for their product lines. Department stores like Sears (in the U.S. and Canada) and Quelle (Germany) sold Beta-format VCRs under their house brands, as did the RadioShack chain of electronic stores. Betamax and VHS competed in a fierce format war, which saw VHS come out on top in most markets.
However, consumers wanted a one piece solution. The first one-piece consumer camcorder, the Betamovie, came from Sony. A major requirement for a one-piece camcorder was miniaturizing the record head drum. Sony's solution to this involved a nonstandard video signal which would become standard only when played back on full sized VCRs. A side effect of this was that Beta camcorders were record-only. Consumers saw this as a major limitation.
VHS manufacturers found a better solution to the drum miniaturization issue. (It involved four heads doing the work of two.) Because it used standard video signals, VHS camcorders could review footage in the camcorder and copy to another VCR for editing. (Two Beta decks and a Betamovie were required for similar functionality, and this still did not allow a videographer to review footage in the field.) This shifted the home movie advantage dramatically away from Beta, and was a primary reason for the loss of Beta market share: Owners of Beta VCRs found that a VHS camcorder would allow them to copy and edit footage to their Beta deck - something that Betamovie could not do. And if rental movies were not available in Beta, they could rent them in VHS and use their camcorder to play them. Owners of VHS VCRs could also choose a variant camcorder format called VHS-C. This used a miniaturized cassette to make a camcorder smaller and lighter than any Betamovie.
Sony could not duplicate the functionality of VHS camcorders, and seeing the rapid loss of market share, eventually introduced the Video8 format. Their hope was that Video8 could replace both Beta and VHS for all uses. For more information, see the article on camcorders.
The VHS format's defeat of the Betamax format became a classic marketing case study. Sony's attempt to dictate an industry standard backfired when JVC made the tactical decision to forgo Sony's offer of Betamax in favor of developing their own technology. They felt that it would end up like the U-Matic deal, with Sony dominating.
By 1980, JVC's VHS format controlled 70% of the North American market. The large economy of scale allowed VHS units to be introduced to the European market at a far lower cost than the rarer Betamax units. In the UK, Betamax held a 25% market share in 1981, but by 1986, it was down to 7.5% and continued to decline further. By 1984, forty companies utilized the VHS format in comparison with Beta's twelve. Sony finally conceded defeat in 1988 when it, too, began producing VHS recorders, though it continued to produce Betamax recorders.
In Japan, Betamax had more success and eventually evolved into Extended Definition Betamax, with 500+ lines of resolution, but eventually both Betamax and VHS were supplanted by laser-based technology. The last Sony Betamax was produced in 2002.
While most casual observers describe Betamax as an obsolete format, there is still a small but fervent group of enthusiastic supporters of the format who continue to use, maintain, and trade the machines and media. Many of these people maintain (on technical merits, not related to run time or availability of prerecorded titles, but more akin to professional video concerns) that Betamax is superior to VHS in many ways, including picture quality, tape wear, and system design and convenience of use. For many of these people, VHS never rendered Betamax obsolete, and DVD may not either; the discrepancy between their view and the mainstream arises from a difference in the criteria (i.e., the interests) on which they judge. Also, some appreciate Betamax decks as examples of superior engineering or innovation for the time—Sony's Betamax was first with many features, such as hi-fi sound, full threading on load (which allows faster transitions between stop, play, and fast winding tape transport modes), and digital freeze frame (never available on a large number of VHS recorder models), which VHS adopted later. Because of their high build quality, many Sony and Sanyo Betamax machines are still working well today, and high-featured models sell regularly for hundreds of dollars on eBay and elsewhere.
In the professional and broadcast video industry, Sony's Betacam, derived from Betamax as a professional format, became one of several standard formats; production houses exchange footage on Betacam videocassettes, and the Betacam system became the most widely used videotape format in the ENG (Electronic News Gathering) industry, replacing the 3/4" U-matic tape format (which was the first practical and cost-effective portable videotape format for broadcast television, signaling the end of 16 mm film — and the phrase "film at 11" often heard on the six-o-clock newscast, before the film had been developed). The professional derivative of VHS, MII (aka Recam), faced off against Betacam and lost. Once Betacam became the de facto standard of the broadcast industry, its position in the professional market mirrored VHS' dominance in the home video market. On a technical level, Betacam and Betamax are similar in that both share the same videocassette shape, use the same oxide tape formulation with the same coercivity, and both record linear audio tracks on the same location of the videotape. But in the key area of video recording, Betacam and Betamax are completely different. BetaCam tapes are mechanically interchangeable with Betamax, but not electronically. BetaCam moves the tape at 12 cm/s, with different recording/encoding techniques. Betamax is a color-under system, with linear tape speeds ranging from 4 cm/s to 1.33 cm/s.
Sony also offered a range of industrial Betamax products, a Beta I-only format for industrial and institutional users. It was basically cheaper and smaller than U-Matic. The arrival of the Betacam system reduced the demand for both Industrial Beta and U-Matic equipment.
Betamax also had a significant part to play in the music recording industry, when Sony introduced its PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) digital recording system as an encoding box/PCM adaptor that connected to a Betamax recorder. The Sony PCM-F1 adaptor was sold with a companion Betamax VCR SL-2000 as a portable digital audio recording system. Many recording engineers used this system in the 1980s and 1990s to make their first digital master recordings.
Initially, Sony was able to tout several Betamax-only features, such as BetaScan—a high speed picture search in either direction—and BetaSkipScan, a technique that allowed the operator to see where he was on the tape by pressing the FF key (or REW, if in that mode) and the transport would switch into the BetaScan mode until the key was released. This feature is discussed more on Peep Search. Sony believed that the M-Load transports used by VHS machines made copying these trick modes impossible. BetaSkipScan (Peep Search) is now available on miniature M-load formats, but even Sony was unable to fully replicate this on VHS. BetaScan was originally called "Videola" until the company that made the Moviola threatened legal action.
Sony would also sell a BetaPak, a small deck designed to be used with a camera. Concerned with the need for several pieces and cables to connect them, an integrated camera/recorder was designed, which Sony dubbed a "Camcorder". The result was Betamovie. Betamovie used the standard-size cassette, but with a modified transport. The tape was wrapped 300 degrees around a smaller, 44.671 mm-diameter head drum, with a single dual-azimuth head to write the video tracks. For playback, the tape would be inserted into a Beta format deck. Due to the different geometry and writing techniques employed, playback within the camcorder was not feasible. SuperBeta and industrial Betamovie camcorders would also be sold by Sony.
Prior to the introduction of Beta Hi-Fi, Sony shifted the Y carrier up by 400 kHz to make room for the 4 FM carriers that would be needed for Beta Hi-Fi. All Beta machines incorporated this change, plus the ability to hunt for a lower frequency pre-AFM Y carrier. Sony incorporated an "antihunt" circuit, to stop the machine hunting for a Y carrier that wasn't there.
Some Sony NTSC models were marketed as "Hi-Fi Ready" (with an SL-HFR prefix to the model's number instead of the usual SL or SL-HF). These Betamax decks looked like a regular Betamax model, except for a special 28-pin connector on the rear. If the user desired a Beta Hi-Fi model but lacked the funds at the time, he could purchase an "SL-HFRxx" and at a later date purchase the separate Hi-Fi Processor. Sony offered two outboard Beta Hi-Fi processors, the HFP-100 and HFP-200. They were identical except that the HFP-200 was capable of multi-channel TV sound, with the word "stereocast" printed after the Beta Hi-Fi logo. This was possible because unlike a VHS Hi-Fi deck, an NTSC Betamax didn't need an extra pair of heads. The HFP-x00 would generate the needed carriers which would be recorded by the attached deck, and during playback the AFM carriers would be passed to the HFP-x00. They also had a small "fine tracking" control on the rear panel for difficult tapes.
For PAL, however, the bandwidth between the chroma and luminance carriers was not sufficient to allow additional FM carriers, so depth multiplexing was employed, wherein the audio track would be recorded in the same way that the video track was. The lower-frequency audio track was written first by a dedicated head, and the video track recorded on top by the video head. The head disk had an extra pair of audio-only heads with a different azimuth, positioned slightly ahead of the regular video heads, for this purpose.
Sony was confident that VHS could not achieve the same audio performance feat as Beta Hi-Fi. However, to the chagrin of Sony, JVC did develop a VHS hi-fi system on the principle of depth multiplexing approximately a year after the first Beta Hi-Fi VCR, the SL-5200, was introduced by Sony. Despite initial praise as providing "CD sound quality", both Beta Hi-Fi and VHS HiFi suffered from "carrier buzz", where high frequency information bled into the audio carriers, creating momentary "buzzing" and other audio flaws. Both systems also used companding noise-reduction systems, which could create "pumping" artifacts under some conditions. Both formats also suffered from interchange problems, where tapes made on one machine did not always play back well on other machines. When this happened and if the artifacts became too distracting, users were forced to revert to the old linear soundtrack.
In 1988, Sony would again push the envelope with ED Beta, or "Enhanced Definition" Betamax, capable of up to 500 lines of resolution, that equaled DVD quality (480 typical). In order to store the ~6.5 megahertz-wide luma signal, with the peak frequency at 9.3 MHz, Sony used a metal formulation tape borrowed from the Betacam SP format (branded "ED-Metal") and incorporated some improvements to the transport to reduce mechanically induced aberrations in the picture. Beta ED also featured a luminance carrier deviation of 2.5 MHz, as opposed to the 1.2 MHz used in SuperBeta, improving contrast with reduced luminance noise.
Sony introduced two ED decks and a camcorder in the late 1980s. The top end EDV-9500 (EDV-9300 in Canada) deck was a very capable editing deck, rivalling much more expensive U-Matic set-ups for its accuracy and features, but did not have commercial success due to lack of timecode and other pro features. Sony did market Beta ED to "semiprofessional" users, or "prosumers". One complaint about the EDC-55 ED CAM was that it needed a lot of light (at least 25 lux), due to the use of two CCDs instead of the typical single-CCD imaging device. The Beta ED lineup only recorded in BII/BIII modes, with the ability to play back BI/BIs.
Despite the sharp decline in sales of Betamax recorders in the late 1980s and subsequent halt in production of new recorders by Sony in 2002, both Betamax and SuperBetamax are still being used by a small number of people. New cassettes are still available for purchase at online shops and used recorders are often found at flea markets, thrift stores or on Internet auction sites. Early format BetaCam cassettes, which are physically based on the Betamax cassette, continue to be available for use in the professional media.
Résolution based on the quality with a standard Kernel Factor of 0.7:
Digital formats Quality based on the résolution with a standard Kernel Factor of 0.7:
Category:Sony products Category:1975 introductions Category:Discontinued media formats Category:Metaphors Category:Video storage
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| Caption | Lane in New York City, November 2005 |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Joseph Lane |
| Birth date | February 03, 1956 |
| Birth place | Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor/Singer |
| Years active | 1975–present |
His second Broadway appearance was in the 1983 musical Merlin, starring Chita Rivera and magician Doug Henning. This was followed by Wind in the Willows as Mr. Toad, Some Americans Abroad at Lincoln Center, the national tour of Neil Simon's Broadway Bound, and On Borrowed Time at Circle in the Square Theatre with George C. Scott again. In 1992, he starred in the revival of Guys and Dolls, receiving his first Tony nomination, as well as Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards, playing the character who lent him his name, opposite Peter Gallagher and Faith Prince.
His professional association with his close friend the playwright Terrence McNally includes roles in Lips Together, Teeth Apart, The Lisbon Traviata (Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards), Bad Habits, Love! Valour! Compassion! (Obie, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards), and Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams (Drama Desk nomination). The early 1990s began a stretch of successful Broadway shows for Lane. In 1993, he portrayed Sid Caesar-like Max Prince in Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor, inspired by Simon's early career writing sketches for Your Show of Shows. In 1996, he starred in the revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, for which he won the Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards.
His association with Sondheim began with the workshop of Assassins, and after Forum he appeared with Victor Garber in the workshop of Wise Guys (later retitled Road Show). Their collaboration continued in 2004 when he revised the original book for and starred in the Broadway debut of the composer's The Frogs at Lincoln Center. He also sang a song written especially for him by Sondheim in the film The Birdcage. In 2000 he starred in the Roundabout revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner as Sheridan Whiteside, with Jean Smart and Harriet Harris. Prior to that he starred in the Encores! production of Do Re Mi.
In addition to the McNally plays, Lane has appeared in numerous other Off Broadway productions, including Love (the musical version of Murray Schisgal's Luv), Measure for Measure directed by Joseph Papp in Central Park, The Common Pursuit, The Film Society, Mizlansky/Zilinsky or Schmucks, In a Pig's Valise, Trumbo, She Stoops to Conquer, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. He also appeared at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in The School for Scandal and John Guare's Moon Over Miami .
Lane performed in 1995's The Wizard of Oz in Concert at Lincoln Center to benefit the Children's Defense Fund. The performance was originally broadcast on Turner Network Television (TNT), and issued on CD and video in 1996. Lane won his second Tony Award for his portrayal of Max Bialystock in the musical version of Mel Brooks's The Producers, as well as Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards. He later replaced Richard Dreyfuss in the role in 2004 at London's Theatre Royal Drury Lane at the last minute, and went on to win the Olivier Award as Best Actor in a Musical. He recreated his performance for the film version, for which he received his second Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy.
Lane has performed two roles originated by Zero Mostel, Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Max Bialystock in The Producers. He declined the role of Tevye in the 2004 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof because he didn't want to be seen as always following in Mostel's footsteps. Coincidentally, both of Lane's Tony Awards were for Mostel's roles.
In 2005, Lane rejoined his Producers co-star Matthew Broderick for an extremely successful limited run of The Odd Couple. In 2006, he changed gears to take on a primarily dramatic role in a revival of Simon Gray's Butley. He and Broderick were awarded adjacent stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in a joint ceremony on January 9, 2006. They were also immortalized as Max and Leo at Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. He next starred in the new David Mamet play, November, directed by Joe Mantello, and in the critically acclaimed revival of Waiting for Godot (Outer Critics Circle nomination) with Bill Irwin. He is now starring in the musical of The Addams Family as Gomez (Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations). In 2008 he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
Lane resides in New York City, with a long time partner. He remains very good friends with Matthew Broderick, Mel Brooks, and Ernie Sabella.
He has hosted Saturday Night Live, The Tony Awards (one time as host, and three as co-host), and appeared on Great Performances (Alice In Wonderland, The Last Mile , and as host of the 30th anniversary, A Celebration in Song). He has starred in two television films, The Boys Next Door and Laughter on the 23rd Floor. With the Boston Pops, he performed a tribute concert of Danny Kaye material, as well as appearing in the Harry Connick Christmas Special; Merry Christmas, George Bailey; and . His attempts at a regular series of his own, Encore! Encore! and Charlie Lawrence, were ratings disappointments.
Lane provided the voice of Tom Morrow, the Audio-Animatronic host of Disneyland's Innoventions attraction.
Category:1956 births Category:American comedians Category:American film actors Category:American musical theatre actors Category:American people of Irish descent Category:American stage actors Category:American television actors Category:American voice actors Category:Daytime Emmy Award winners Category:Drama Desk Award winners Category:Gay actors Category:LGBT Christians Category:LGBT people from the United States Category:LGBT rights activists from the United States Category:Living people Category:Olivier Award winners Category:Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners Category:People from Jersey City, New Jersey Category:Shakespearean actors Category:Tony Award winners
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
