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.

[cbenham]

Originally Posted by ceebee23

I have three beta PAL vcrs.

Were there any 50 HZ VTRs or VCRs that were made for 405 line British TV?
I'd like to find one of either flavour for a project I'm working on. Actually any 50Hz unit will do.

I'd like to try to run one on 48Hz power and record CBS sequential color on it. There were no video tape machines in 1951 when CBS color was the US Standard. Cliff

[ceebee23]

As I understand it many early UK vcrs could receive and record 405 line but I am not sure of the details.... perhaps one of the UK residents on the board can help you...

[RJMiranda]

Originally Posted by cbenham

Were there any 50 HZ VTRs or VCRs that were made for 405 line British TV?
I'd like to find one of either flavour for a project I'm working on. Actually any 50Hz unit will do.

I'd like to try to run one on 48Hz power and record CBS sequential color on it. There were no video tape machines in 1951 when CBS color was the US Standard. Cliff

Power frequency is not related with the scanning frequency on VCRs. The motors use DC from the power supply, and their speed is controlled by the servo circuits. So the drum is going to keep running at 25 Hz no matter what the power frequency. Even if the CBS sync is similar to the EIA sync (I have to look it up) and the sync separator works OK, 24 Hz is 96% of 25 Hz, and I am not sure that the modern servos are designed to work with such a frequency offset. Even the cheapest cameras of the Betamax era had crystal-controlled sync generators, so the VCR designers would not expect the input vertical frequency to be ONE FULL Hz off.