Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Why Sony's Beta Videotape System Failed--Part 2" video.

  1. 12:42 That whole “will it play on my VCR?” argument from the VHS-C camp was never really convincing. TVs and living-room VCRs both soon added extra AV inputs on the side, to make it easy to plug in your camcorder. And you had to copy to do editing anyway. I think worldwide Video-8 and Hi-8 outsold VHS-C and S-VHS-C. Also the extra recording time didn’t hurt.
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  2. A lot of the generation loss copying between consumer VCRs was not so much actual degradation of the video signal, but poor timebase sync. There were gadgets you could buy (I have one) that would clean up the sync and give you much better copies. Would that have made a difference to the comparison?
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  3. 13:59 “Economies of scale to rear their ugly head”, boyo!
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  4. 2:52 “A minute”? HAH! Here in NZ, I would regularly set the end time 5 or 10 minutes after the scheduled end of the program. And heaven help you if there was any live sport on ...
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  5. 14:33 Sony made good VHS machines, by the way. I have an SLV-757NC from about 1989. It does trick play, picture-in-picture, and has an editing jog shuttle. It normally keeps the tape threaded (Beta-style) for fast-wind, for fast switch to play mode, but slower fast-winding. There is an extra-fast-rewind button you can press which is supposed to unthread the tape, but I never measured any noticeable speed increase with it.
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