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Article from Electronics & Music Maker, October 1981

An up-date on the Beta system video recorders.


In the past I may have been guilty of treating the Beta system as the poor relation, and even though its market share is only a fraction of that enjoyed by VHS one should not make the mistake of treating it as dead. Quite the opposite, as we shall see this month, with four significant Beta-only developments to investigate. In many ways it is only a historical accident that Beta format did not make it to number one in the popularity stakes, and in some markets, notably South America, it is numero uno. Technically, there is little to choose between Beta and VHS, and your final choice depends more on the availability of tapes and machines to your taste. Up to recently in this country there was not much of a choice in the latter area; on the one hand you had the impressive but expensive C-7 from those awfully nice Sony people and on the other you had Sanyo's bargain basement machine which was making it so difficult for VHS to get into the real budget video area. Very recently Sanyo have restyled their low cost machine and Sony have brought a new mid-price recorder, the C-5, on to the market. No doubt both of these machines will find their way into homes and increase the popularity of the Beta format.

Toshiba's new V-8600B video recorder.


At the premium end of the market Sony's C-7 was the only machine to look at, so it's good to know there is now another one to consider. It's the V-8600B from Toshiba and as the photograph shows, it's an impressive beast. Like Sony's C-7 it differs from other machines on the market. It also has the same type of touch switches as the C-7 on the top front edge of the cabinet. In fact this coincidence led my evil mind to wonder if Toshiba's new baby was just the Sony chassis in another housing but this is not the case. I suppose they may be buying in some of the Sony mechanical assemblies but the features are significantly different and in fact, the controls are not the same. Benefitting from experience gained in the USA market, the new Toshiba machine uses four, not two, heads: the additional two heads are reserved for achieving faultless freeze-frame and "super slow motion" pictures. Without the extra heads it is far less easy to get rid of the "noise bars" on the trick functions and certainly on the Sony T-7 (and possibly C-7) this had not been perfected. The new V-8600B also offers picture search at seven to twenty-five times normal speed, in both forward and reverse directions. I must say, of all the "trick" features I have seen, this is the only really useful one I have come across. It's ideal for skipping adverts and finding the start of programmes when you have recorded several programmes on one tape. Slow motion I never use and freeze-frame very occasionally. There is a remote control unit, with an optional infra-red (wireless) one as well. The recorder also features BNR — Beta Noise Reduction — to improve sound quality, but I have not yet been able to evaluate this against the more commonly used Dolby system. The retail price, including VAT, is quoted as £685.50 and my verdict is: well worth considering, particularly if you can find it below this price.

Sony C-7 with Betastack cassette changer.


Development three is a Sony exclusive, the Betastack cassette changer. This is a highly ingenious device which sits atop your VCR and holds three additional tapes. It covers the machine's tape handling controls and operates them automatically. Using the longest length of tape cassette, with one in the VCR and three in the Autostack you can work out for yourself how many programmes you could record while you were away for a holiday... the mind boggles how many episodes of "Crossroads" you could get in! Obviously it will only fit Sony machines and certain models at that, so you had better ask your friendly dealer whether it would work with yours. Ask him his price at the same time, since manufacturers' recommended prices are a bit of a nonsense. I have been reading an American test report on this device and they said both installation and operation were simple, although if you didn't want a programme to be split between two tapes you had to figure in dummy programmes so that changes took place during these. Performance is said to be superb: actual changeover of tapes takes only 15 seconds and the device handled them very gently. The hardest handling is a quiet two and a half inch drop into a tray for the completed cassettes. Wonder if the VHS camp will come out with a me-too product?

Our fourth development is also from Sony, the SLO-383 Betamax Videocassette Editor. It is the world's first editing deck for domestic video tapes and will probably set a trend for a new era of low cost consumer and industrial units. Its unique four-head design uses two "flying" erase heads to ensure perfectly clean edits without any "glitches" visible. Segments can be assembled one at a time in order, or a new sequence can be inserted in the middle of an existing one. Highspeed searching is possible, as is slow backward motion to back up to an edit point. Direct FM dub in/dub out jacks enable you to bypass the normal video jacks, resulting in a little less smearing and colour noise. Price in the States is $3750, which puts it out of the home user's budget, but for the small college, industrial or fledgling commercial studio it is a bargain. We shall have to see how quickly Sony bring out a European version; it should not be long.

To round off our little chat this month, a couple of things to look out for if you're a VHS enthusiast. Sony now are in the enviable position of having a manufacturing licence for VHS tapes, but it remains to be seen (a) whether they use it, and (b) whether their tapes come out under their own name. Interesting though... The other point is a novel idea from the USA — where else — in which you have a snap-together tape cassette in which you insert the spools of tape. The spools are stored, however, in separate boxes and you need only one tape cassette as such. It is claimed that this method saves a lot of money! What next?! Back to sanity next month — see you there!


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Publisher: Electronics & Music Maker - Music Maker Publications (UK), Future Publishing.

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Electronics & Music Maker - Oct 1981

Feature by Andy Emmerson

Previous article in this issue:

> Discotek

Next article in this issue:

> Hi-Fi


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