Betacam/Betacam S.P. anyone? (owning, personal expericences)
 

Does any one around here ownes and/or haves/had personal experiences with the Betacam/Betacam S.P. format?
I'm looking for a Betacam S.P. machine, but couldn't find one in my budget tag.
Can a Betacam S.P. machine play a standard Betacam videocassette (Betacam that was before the Betacam S.P.).

I never owned a deck or camcorder but I end up getting a load of new in hardbox blank Betacam tape back in 1992 from a friend and end up using them around 1998 with my regular Sony Betamax since the regular blank beta tapes were starting to dry up in the stores .At that time I probably could not afford a used Betacam system nevermind a new one.

A little off topic. Its like now at the same point like the beta blank shortage years ago is to start recording over some of the SVHS stock I got from another friend a couple years ago .

Hi there,

I actually own a PVW 2800 Betacam SP recorder / player. They're nice decks. They were full broadcast quality for analog. They were used in ENG & EFP situations and every television station back in the day had a thousand of them. They often came with all the bells and whistles for editing and the like. And the BVW series actually came with 4 audio tracks, while they PVW & UVW only had 2.

A cheap player / recorder would probably be a UVW 1800. They were meant to be feeder decks and so aren't as high end, but will play back all the stuff the more featureful machines will.

As far as compatibility, all Betacam SP decks will play both oxide (Betacam) & metal (SP) tapes.

There were digital formats that used these tapes as well, called digi-beta, beta sx, etc. These decks are mostly SD, and not all of them will playback the older analog formats.

There was an HD variant to digi-beta called HDCam I believe. But I'd never really used it. And the tapes and decks were incompatible with the earlier analog formats.

Anway, hope that helps.

David