Quote:
Originally Posted by DTVuser2009
We can still buy blank Betamax tapes here at Radioshack. and i lost many a tape during the U-load whenever a post would snap off or during rewind since it kept it loaded the entire time. great way for even the slightest warp to cause one heck of a tangled backlash inside the recorder, the oldest one i had was a Sony with the analog tuner/clock on front and it didn't stop during a error, just kept going and caused a huge mess of tape. it emptied an entire cassette around the drum. i just tossed it it wasn't operable in my opinion.
Sony marketed Beta too, and it too was a superior format but it lost. i cannot recall who did Laserdisc, but i only remember it being available both in players and discs for a couple years in town, despite the decades i see online. it only showed up for a moment here in the early 1990s, with LP-sized compact discs, and a player that looked like a 1st generation DVD changer, sadly there was no recorder available during its entire run, and while the players are common here in flea markets, try finding a disc or movie outside ebay.
As for Blu-Ray, a common gripe from my end, that mom's player won't play half her Blu-Ray collection, only a 1/4 of it; although all DVDs play fine and in better quality. it 'upconverts' DVDs.
Blu-Ray players are VERY picky. if that keeps up that alone will destroy it. i wouldn't pay the $200+ for a Blu-Ray player only to have it play 1 out of 5 Blu-Ray discs.
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Laserdisc was manufactured by Pioneer. Both the discs and the hardware. The first laserdiscs and players appeared in 1979. Shortly thereafter, RCA came out with it's competing videodisc format, the CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc), which was a needle in groove format, just like 12" LP records, only it was stored in a protective plastic case that the CED Disc player would open and remove the disc from when that disc/case cartridge was inserted into the player. One of my friend's family had the very first Laserdisc Player model, the LD-1000, I believe, that was a top loader, in the early 1980's and I bought one of the very first models that had the capability of playing Laserdiscs encoded with digital sound in 1987.
Beta of course is still very much alive and well today in the professional videography market, with Betacams and Digibeta tapes and cams still a staple in production and news gathering. However, it's days too are numbered, and has probably already started to slowly dwindle. I never ever had a problem with any Betamax tape getting stuck as you describe. You had some bad luck. Although of course a tape could get stuck, it could also do so in VHS. VHS was and still is the biggest piece of crap video recording and playback technology that succeeded only because of marketing and missteps by Sony. Thank God Blu-Ray won out over
HD-DVD which was another inferior format just waiting to repeat history.
Less advertising throughout
