Who Has Beta?

[ceebee23]

I have three beta PAL vcrs. A Sanyo 9300, a Toshiba 8600 and a Sanyo M50 HiFI vcr along with some 200 cassettes. (In fact a friend arrived with a box of unused L750s the other day.)

PAL Beta vcrs are all single speed and an L750 at approx. BII speed gives 195 mins.

There were no PAL SuperBeta or BetaED vcrs.

Beta has some technical advantages over VHS but lost the marketing war.

I have found that I rarely get tracking errors with Beta tapes even old recordings or tapes from other vcrs.

Beta HiFi on NTSC machines is radically different to HiFi on PAL beta units which use a system akin to VHS HiFi depth multiplex recording. On NTSC Beta the HiFi sound is recorded in "spare" space on the video tracks ...this was not available in PAL and hence Sony adopted the VHS format for HiFi sound. Unlike VHS cassettes where HiFi will drop out if tracking drifts, I have never had this problem on my Beta HiFi unit.