Home Movies
Two-piece camera/VCR systems rapidly displaced Super 8 mm film as the medium of choice for shooting home movies and amateur films. These units included a portable VCR, which the videographer would carry by a shoulder strap, and a separate camera, which was connected to the VCR by a special cable. At this point, Beta had several advantages over VHS systems. The smaller Beta cassette made for smaller and lighter VCRs.
However, consumers wanted a one-piece solution. The first one-piece consumer camcorder, the Betamovie, came from Sony. A major requirement for a one-piece camcorder was miniaturizing the recording head drum, and Sony's solution to this involved a nonstandard video signal which would become standard only when played back on full-sized VCRs. A side effect of this was that Beta camcorders were record-only: consumers saw this as a major limitation.
VHS manufacturers found a better solution to drum miniaturization (it involved four heads doing the work of two). Because it used standard video signals, VHS camcorders could review footage in the camcorder and copy to another VCR for editing. This shifted the home movie advantage dramatically away from Beta, and was a primary reason for the loss of Beta market share: owners of Beta VCRs found that a VHS camcorder would allow them to copy and edit footage to their Beta deck – something that Betamovie could not do. If rental movies were not available in Beta, they could rent them in VHS and use their camcorder to play them. Owners of VHS VCRs could also choose a variant camcorder format called VHS-C. This used a miniaturized cassette to make a camcorder smaller and lighter than any Betamovie.
Sony could not duplicate the functionality of VHS-C camcorders, and seeing the rapid loss of market share, eventually introduced the Video8 format. Their hope was that Video8 could replace both Beta and VHS for all uses. For more information, see the article on camcorders.
Read more about this topic: Betamax
Famous quotes containing the words home and/or movies:
“For most visitors to Manhattan, both foreign and domestic, New York is the Shrine of the Good Time. “I don’t see how you stand it,” they often say to the native New Yorker who has been sitting up past his bedtime for a week in an attempt to tire his guest out. “It’s all right for a week or so, but give me the little old home town when it comes to living.” And, under his breath, the New Yorker endorses the transfer and wonders himself how he stands it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)