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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
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