Why no built-in TBC in 1980+ VCRs?

[DVtyro]

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

I remember when 16K of RAM was in the hundreds for my Apple IIe back in the 1980's so imagine what that would be for a home grade VHS or Betamax VCR to do say a field of video, I'm not counting the ADC & DAC or any of the interface circuits to make it happen. My dad replaced our Sony top load Betamax with a new Hitachi VT-98 VHS HiFi in early 1985 for something north of half a grand. The HiFi added a few hundred bucks to the $299 base price of the low end VT series. I can't imagine what it would cost to have a real TBC in those days.

RAM sure was expensive, but by 1985 it became affordable. Here is a RAM price chart from 1970 to 2000:



Or, in numbers:

1970 - $734,000/MB
1975 - $50,000/MB
1980 - $6,000/MB
1985 - $300/MB
1990 - $46/MB
1995 - $9/MB
2000 - $0.7/MB

Late 1980s VHS had "Digital" written all over them. With PiP and digital freeze frame I presume these machines already had ADC and DAC.

1MB is needed for a full-frame storage, so $300 in 1985 was doable for a high-end machine, even cheaper by the start of the 1990s. I would expect high end SVHS machines to incorporate this feature as standard, too bad this did not happen.

The jump from MBs to GBs for RAM happened so quickly I barely noticed it. My 1998 laptop has 256 MB of RAM. My next desktop had, I believe, 2GB.