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Sony To End Sales of Betamax Tapes Next Year
AmiMoJo writes: In March 2016 Sony will finally end sales of its Betamax video tapes. The firm revealed on its website that it will also stop shipping the Micro MV cassette, used in video cameras. Sony launched the format in 1975, a year before JVC's rival the VHS cassette — which eventually became the market leader after a long battle between the two brands and their fans. Although many felt Betamax was the superior format, most cite the longer recording length of VHS tapes — three hours versus one — and the cheaper manufacturing costs for VHS machines as the main factors as to why VHS eventually won out. When my dad stops buying VHS tapes in bulk, maybe that market will finally wither away, too.
betamax won in the commercial setting.
VHS was better in homes.
Modern VHS tapes are complete crap, like modern floppy disks. Built to extremely low standards because hardly anyone uses them and they sell for ridiculously low prices. Many of them are old stock that have been sitting on a shelf for decades, or even worse in a shop window getting temperature cycled by the sun.
So the only option is to buy in bulk, throw away the duds and record to them only once.
Why wouldn't you just switch to recording on DVD/flash drive? It's mostly people with old equipment that they don't want to give up. Maybe they have a big VHS library, maybe they have an old computer that doesn't have USB (Amiga/Atari/early Apple etc). Having said that, there was some youngish bloke on the TV complaining when they stopped selling VCRs at major retailers, because analogue noise isn't as bad as digital noise etc, so there are actually some luddites out there too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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Why don't we have a plug-in digital replacement for VHS/Beta tapes? With modern tech and materials, it wouldn't be that hard to devise a digital interface to the old helical-scan mechanism in the standard cassette formats. Not much of a market, for sure, but if they're still making tapes, apparently somebody is still using them. Might make a good kickstarter project for someone...
Another in the same vein... why can't I get a digital-imaging back for my old 35mm Nikon cameras? Seems like I should be able to get something like that for a few hundred bucks in today's economy.
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I seem to remember a story from a local group that's involved in documenting the local media scene. They had just recently inherited a *shipping container* full of VHS tapes that a recently dead woman had saved up. She had been recording all the local news programs. Every day. For decades. Never overwrote the tapes.
The documenters are thrilled, but what a daunting digitizing project.
Your old Nikon back is worth pennies. The lenses, perhaps quite a bit more.
People have tried to work this out for years and it just doesn't fly. A digital camera is a much different beast than a film unit. The ergonomics and data displays for a digital camera just encompass much more than the film cannister. Really, keep your old F4 on the mantle, buy a Nikon 3200 - the very bottom of the DSLR line and find it stomps the image quality and handling of any film camera ever made.* Nostalgia is just that.
* If you want to use your old lens, you're going to have to pony up to a D800 or so, but now we're getting technical.
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