Comparing Beta & VHS on Quality: Was Beta Really Better?
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- Опубликовано: 20 сен 2024
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This video has been re-uploaded with the VHS footage captured from the RCA VDT-600, a VCR from 1979. This is a much fairer comparison than using the Panasonic unit as the VHS playback device. Many people believe that Beta was a vastly superior product to VHS, but I think this was mostly marketing prowess on Sony's part. People seemed to think that they were giving up something of quality if the went with VHS over Beta. But as this video will demonstrate, I don't think that was really the case.
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Who's watching in 2018?
To clear methods up (my intro is confusing): The Panasonic modern VCR was used only to record _onto the VHS tape_ and the RCA unit from 1979 was used to play the tape back. This may have given the VHS recording a *slight* edge because a more advanced machine was used to create it, but a machine FAR LESS advanced than the Beta model was used to play the tape and capture the resulting output. I think whatever edge the Panasonic VCR gave to the original recording is cancelled out due to the fact that a venerable dinosaur played it back. After all, it can't magically become better than it was when built at playing a tape. This is also probably why the VHS recording is slightly overexposed as it is not playing its own recording.
at the same time, playing back a VHS tape in a different machine may increase tracking errors vs it being recorded on the same deck. the tracking errors do appear more severe on the VHS recording while on beta you really have to squint to tell that they're there
Generally the vhs/dvd combo units had very poor vhs playback. I mean they did a good job of giving a clean picture but it was a bad idea to use them for any archival or capturing. They looked like an added generation loss of quality compared to the playback on a good standalone deck.
+Knightmessenger That's kinda to be expected as I suspect that most of them are limited to recording using the DVD-Video standard which means in the best case H262 encoding at 9,800 kbit/s (Though it's unlikely the encoder is even set that high even commercial disks usually had average bitrates closer to 5 Mbps with peak bitrates of 7-8 Mbps made them a bit more tolerant of dirty/scratched disks without suffering buffer underruns.
he's talking about using the DVD/VHS combo player for recording VHS though
Dude, You did a great job and produced an excellent vid. I believe you are siding with VHS ...ME TOO !
Darnit, I still can't decide which one to buy.
Buy betacam. Ha
Zcooger U-matic
I tought about U-Matic too. No shit.
Usually the more popular format is better to buy these days because the consumables are more cheaper and not that rare.
I had a Panasonic U-Matic...Great stereo sound with it's 3 3/4 IPS travel , good image and all... But great big machine + Great big cassette = only 1 hour play
First off I love your videos
but you used a ß instead of a β - unforgivable lol
I was going to point this out too. This needs more attention.
The former character is the German character "eszett", used to me "ss"
@@elwoodcope7152 Yeßßß
Lewis72 today „ss“ is used for many words with ß.
ß means „Sz“ and its called „a harsh s“.
Written in old german letters you can clearly See that the ß is just the combination of a Capital S and a small z.
So, youre wellcome ^^
@@wiskimike Actually, it's "sharp s".
Even recording the modern world on tape makes it look old and nostalgic. Love it
I watched a video of 90s recorded in HD and the colours were still muted lol
My dad bought one of the first Magnavox VHS VCR. $7,000. 1980. And then he bought the VHS Camcorder $4,000. That thing was a monster. He went free lance in the news business. It was a good call. He was making crazy money for his footage from fires and accidents. He used a scanner to get to the scene first. Some reporter took pictures. My dad took video. That was like gold to the tv news.
Great idea. Who would have thought JVC would beat Sony with VHS beating Betamax? and I remember both when I was very young. Just sticking that tape inside the machine and hear it whirl triggers childhood memories for me.
Was your Dad a character in the movie "Nightcrawler"?
Unbelievable how much opportunity average people had in the western countries.
@@Zodroo_Tint yup, it's insane
Two things:
-The amount of mileage you get out of your own theme song is incredible.
-Actually getting to hear a longer section of it shows that it's actually even better than I thought, and I already liked it.
It seems it wasn't the channel theme song at the time, but rather _became_ the theme song because of these VHS/Beta episodes. He did some kind of channel reboot at some point (I still haven't identified the precise video when it happens) where he switched form "guy in front of a green screen" to a more modish "RUclipsr" presentation style, and started using the "aggressively smooth jazz" as a theme song around that time.
It's an Audio Library piece called "Floaters" by Jimmy Fontanez.
@@zakesters "AGGRESSIVELY SMOOTH JAZZ " are words that really don't ever use together. Lol
@@grilleFire you should turn on the captions for the outros in Technology Connections' more recent videos for an Easter egg that started with the captions in his video titled "A Short Project Involving LEDs, a Fish Tank, and some Laziness."
I worked at a video place back in the late 70's-early 80's. We were a JVC and Sony authorized dealer and as such we sold both vhs and beta, and we set up side-by-side a/b comparisons from time to time for customers. As I recall the beta looked slightly better. Slightly. But back then, blank tapes were $35 - $40 on sale. Because of that, and also due to longer recording times on vhs, beta video being slightly better did not matter to most of our customers who bought vhs. The "videophile" types bought beta. Both sets of customers seemed happy with their choice. Back then, just being able to record shows and play them back later was a minor miracle. But my thought on it at the time was that home videotape recordings were so poor regardless of system, it would never be a truly viable archival medium.
Bit silly to say they were so poor, when they were fairly competitive with everything else at the time. Laserdisc was better but way more pricey and cumbersome.
The sheer volume you could make of them and record onto practicaly guaranteed it would be a form of archival outside of digital.
"The "videophile" types bought beta. Both sets of customers seemed happy with their choice."
Until the "videophiles" realized they only got that slightly better picture quality at B1 speed which only gave them an hour of recording time on a standard tape, and then a few years later when they realized there were less and less movies for them to rent, and then none at all at most places by the mid 1980s.
1:07 WTF?! At first, I thought that this segment was recorded via either beta or VHS, and I was blown away by the quality! But then you said it was from your smartphone.
Yo same
It is, but the footage is recorded onto vhs and beta, the same way a high quality camera footage would be back in the day. Did you think these were shot on camcorders? Cuz that's not what he's comparing here.
The differences are less noticeable than I expected.
The beta is hardly any better.
Agreed
They are certainly a lot less noticeable than the difference I actually saw when I actually used both formats professionally nearly 40 years ago. :)
Long story short: there are several problems in this comparison, that make both formats look worse than they should, and one big problem that makes VHS look better than it actually did.
@@RFC3514 or, infinitely more likely, you never looked at both of them side by side on a completely level playing field and your perception at the time was plagued by confirmation bias. After all "eyewitness testimony" is one of the LEAST accurate or reliable things out there.
@@zacharysmith2983 - Or, infinitely more likely, I actually know what I'm talking about because I worked with both professionally for several years (when both formats were current), including _dozens_ of side-by-side comparisons with the latest equipment available, and I'm not just comparing equipment from different eras to do a 10-minute RUclips video.
But hey, obviously you're free to get your history lessons from a guy mixing wildly different material in his spare room, and assume everyone working in video production in the 70s and 80s must have been a moron somehow "plagued by confirmation bias" about an experience they were _actually having_ first hand (meaning there was nothing to "confirm").
It really made a difference switching which vcr you played out of. In the original video VHS looked much better but here they're pretty equivalent (though beta seems to have better contrast imo)
My connection is so shit that I can only watch in 144p so I can't tell which is better
You Actually Watch in 144p?! How can you bear that?!
At full HD the only clear difference to me is that the VHS appears a little lighter and sometimes has a little more distortion at the bottom of the frame, so it recording longer for less makes it the obvious choice for most consumers.
OBVIOUSLY, the 144p is better than 144i, DUH! ;)
+omar you can but it would take 15 minutes to an hour to buffer enough
source: my internet speed drops to 20kBps at times and is 100kB to 1mB (rarely) max. i plug in my phone for life support
Where do you live,...1990? :D
I forgot how crappy TV use to be and how good it has actually gotten, thanks for the reminder. I imagine in 20 years the VR systems will be nearly indistinguishable from real life :)
And the samples were recorded with a modern camera. If it was recorded with a camcorder from the day or even a TV signal, the image would be much, much worse, since the early consumer video cameras were very poor and TV's had only an i480 input. Also, most people recorded at EP to get the most out of their tapes. Those videos are extremely poor and grainy.
@M D
i still have some old recordings from 20 or so years ago all done on lp , they are just about watchable but look more like cartoons now , the sound as still good tho :-)
Experimental Fun Unless you screw up like NASA does on the ISS with their CGI VR sets from time to time. Nasa has given up on the blatant use of VR trying to fool people.
In fairness you wouldn't notice the quailty of the image itself as much if you were watching on a standard 1980's
television. You would still see the difference, just not as much. This recording will look awful on any modern device, beta or vhs won't matter much.
VyperByteX the recording is only limited by the film stock grade and camera used. Remember that pesky Film is well over 8000X 8000 resolution . We take these old film reels and scan them at higher rates. Digital was a way to control the masses into esoteric formats. Example all Digital recording cameras can shoot 1 fps to the max of the hardware but the consumer cameras are locked down to specific formats on purpose to Manipulate the camera marker on the consumer side. Notice how the Pro market does not have these firmware locks on their cameras. In 2018 we are hacking cameras to remove these deliberately set locks and hacking cameras!!! This is beyond retarded. The move to digital was to get away from these limiting formats not to set locks on camera equipment.
The Beta does have better contrast.
VHS have that oddly colored line in the bottom.
rashidisw This has nothing to do with the VHS standard though, its due to some technical problem or compatibility problem between the player that it was recorded on and the player that was used for playback. The player was from 1979 after all. Compatibility problems was quite common back then in the analog days, prerecorded tapes often was so so compared to a tape that was recorded/played on the same machine, tracking adjustment could sometimes solve the problem, but not always.
The problem is due to differences in when the video head switchpoint occurs between the VCR used to record the footage and the VCR used to play it back. That also happens with Beta.
"That also happens with Beta."
Well, not really.
In the 80s a neighbor family regularly rent some Japanese anime shows, that was in Beta cassette format.
No stupid bottom line ever happened there. And i pretty much doubt they using the same VCR to whatever used to record the shows in Japan.
Sony did tend to have strict adherence to the specifications, especially when it came to equipment they made for use by duplication companies for recording copies (decks like the SLO-1400 and SLO-1800).
But there have been instances where the PG shift was set slightly differently on one VCR compared to another, especially if a VCR was from a different manufacturer, such as comparing Sony to Sanyo or NEC to Toshiba.
Also, different TVs can have different amounts of overscan. Obviously, TV sets with less overscan may mean a higher likelihood of seeing that line for a given VCR.
In the 80s, I grew up with Beta. Today, I've just got through fixing an SL-2700.
This is becoming one of my favorite channels, the narration speed and tone is terrific too unlike those regular RUclips people’s annoying constipated voice
When my family decided to rent a video recorder in 1981 we weren't sure which to get. Blank tapes were about the same price on both formats, expensive at around a tenner for a just one 3 hour tape. One of the main reasons we got a video recorder was to rent films. After looking in several rental shops we noticed that there were 10 times more to rent on VHS than there were on Betamax, so that's why we went for VHS. We didn't consider which was the better quality at all.
Looks like more contrast and clarity in the beta picture which is probably what people seen as a sharper picture. The shot with the focus chart shows how the VHS holds more of the black gradients. Good video 👍
That's what I saw, higher contrast.
Difficult choice, still can’t decide which one to buy. I guess I’ll have to wait and see which one becomes de facto standard.
D Gravare Be really cool and buy both. Make you really popular with friends bringing a tape over for movie night!
or you can just get a laserdisc player and have an actually watchable and tolerable format with many more pros and cheaper movie titles
who are you replying to
If I had been alive in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I would have felt that the simplest solution regarding the format war would have been to buy both a VHS and a Betamax. By doing so, I would have had the benefits of having more options in terms of selection of rental tapes and would have been able to trade extensively with owners of both formats.
+Sam Peterson The first VCRs were well over $600 each. For example, the first Betamax (Sony SL-7200) retailed for $1,300 in early 1976 and the first VHS (RCA VBT-200) sold for $1,000 when it was introduced in August of 1977. Blank tapes were also very expensive as well, usually selling for as much as $40 a piece as late as September of 1980. It wasn't until 1981 that the price of a VCR fell below the $600 mark, and blank tapes remained expensive into the mid-1980s. Considering those factors, I would have likely had to make a choice between both video formats in the late 1970s. I probably would have went with the Betamax format at first and waited until the early 1980s to get a VHS recorder. Still, if I was relatively well-off in the late 1970s, I would have went with both formats.
I was in TV & radio broadcasting school in the mid 1990's. I only found your channel yesterday, but all your videos about pre-HD video and audio hit home in a wonderfully nostalgic way. Hearing you talk about VHS vs Beta or how vinyl records work, OMG, my mind was exploding with the light.
I'd love to see you do a video about the Amiga with a Video Toaster, preferably with the Video Toaster Flyer. I was doing real time, non-linear editing in 1996 on an Amiga 4000, 40MHz CPU & 32 MB of ram and a Video Toaster Flyer. Even a $100,000 Avid system couldn't do real time effects like the lowly Amiga could.
I bet you loved Babylon 5 and seaQuest (CGI done with Amiga). Not in real time of course. Prerendered.
4:25 This feels like a 90s sunday afternoon soap opera intro.
I want to find the name of it
Lilacia Park, of course.
The song
@@AlexS-sc3gb oh. D'oh. Of course.
Carry on, don't mind me. 😂
I thought you wanted to find a fictional name.for this soap opera.
Alexander Simanovsky don’t know if you ever found it, but it’s Floaters by Jimmy Fontanez
That smooth jazz music at the first video giving a great 80s experience
In summary, they are both AMAZING technologies when you think they are forty years old
Pfft, consumer formats are consumer formats...BetaCAM ("CAM" artificially emphasized here) blew them both out of the water.
@@ebinrock well by that logic, 70mm film blows all of them out of the water
@@tristan6509 yes it does.
Alan Sutherland could you have ever imagined back then that video would have become a virtual medium which is simply a computer data codec stored on a hard drive or flash media? My mind still boggles with the pace of change in this field when you consider that vinyl records and photographic film have remained virtually unchanged for over a century.
@@MrDegsy69 Technically, most records before the late 40s were actually shelac, but yes, I do get what you are saying, especially with the recent, rapid advances in personal computing and networking. I suppose this could be partially attributed to the cold war era space race.
4:05 - 5:00 Who put present day into a high quality movie intro from the 90's?
Does anyone else think the BETA did a better job of maintaining detail in highlight areas? Look at the distant brickwork at 3:55 or the white stripes on train at 4:27 for example - areas seem washed out in the VHS that maintain detail in the BETA, also the church steeple at 4:35. Heck, even the letters on the sign at 4:35 show an improvement in detail. Or the silver truck at 4:43
yeah, that's what i immediately noticed and appreciated the most. you can also really see it in the shots of the flowers, where in the VHS the bright colors of the flowers blow out and make it hard to make out the details in the betamax version it's a little easier to make out the petals.
Yep better dynamic range for sure.
I think the beta image was better in almost all cases. The detail of edges was better and red crawl was less.
Yes. The VHS looked totally blown out. VHS was an awful format. Let’s be honest. Completely horrible. There’s like no excuse for how bad it was. Should have been SVHS or nothing.
yep
Interesting video, thank you. Such a difficult comparison to draw. The quality of playback that you got back from a VCR was very dependent on the quality of the tape used. As no one is making good tapes now, and tapes degrade significantly, it is probably impossible to properly test now. What this film does show I think is that there was not enough difference to be able to say one was much better than the other when using old or sub-par tape which would have been common, even in the heyday. color test
Here in PAL land, we didn't have different Beta speeds, and for the most part only had two VHS speeds (SP / LP). VHS EP became available just as VHS was dying. An L750 PAL tape gives about 3 hours 20 minutes.
You have pointed out that Betamax is a different format to Betacam (though there are a few details crossovers such as position of linear audio heads, batteries on some portables were interchangeable, and early Betacam oxide recorders could use blank Betamax tapes). It's interesting to note though that every time Panasonic tried to compete against Betacam with a VHS derived format, it bombed miserably. Betacam vs M, Betacam won. BetacamSP vs MII, Betacam SP won. Digital Betacam vs D3, Digital Betacam won, etc. The smaller size of the Beta tape was better suited to camera work, whereas VHS tapes were too large for cameras and the smaller tape size used in MII for cameras meant for very thin tape and unreliable mechanics. It's therefore fair to say that the oversize VHS tape hobbled its conversion to a studio format. Sony surely made more money from Beta than anyone ever did from VHS, if you include the professional arena as well as domestic.
Betamax also had another life beyond video. PCM digital audio recordings on Betamax tapes were popular with recording studios as a way to carry CD quality digital audio from one location to another in the days before suitable disk drives were available. VHS versions were available but really couldn't compete with the Beta standard.
video99.co.uk I saw one of those in operation. it was a portable beta recorder approx 8 x 8 x 4 inches and then a second box about the same size did the stereo digitization and created a b&w image for the betamax deck to record. It was abound 1986 or 87.
i'm from belgium, and thus also PAL system, and we had both a betamax and a VHS system and only used the vhs when we needed to record some very long programs because the betamax could not do this. for all other recordings we used betamax because it looked a lot better and mainly because it sounded way better. i also have the idea that you could watch a betamax a lot more times without getting that much loss of quality as you could with a VHS but i could be wrong about that one, it's a long time ago. I think you need to record some analog video from a cable and view it on a old TV to test this.
When I bought my first VCR in around 1979 (PAL system) I spent a lot of time comparing the best VHS and Beta machines available (all mono linear sound).
The slower tape speed of Beta, combined with the absence of any noise reduction circuitry meant the amount of tape hiss completely spoiled the viewing for me.
(Beta Noise reduction hadn't been added yet)
Even later, when the stereo linear VHS decks (with Dolby B noise reduction) were compared to Beta with BNR, the VHS audio was much lower in hiss with a higher maximum frequency because of those lower hiss levels.
Later still, when JVC invented depth multiplex recording for VHS to compete with the Beta HiFi system they'd added to NTSC Beta machines, Sony had to pay royalties to JVC for that technology because PAL Beta lacked the notch between the Luminance and Chroma in the encoded signal which went to tape, where they'd squeezed in the dual FM signals for Beta Hifi.
Having said that, while VHS Hifi audio and Beta Hifi quality was similar in the PAL markets, whenever a dropout on tape caused the player to default momentarily to the linear track, the Beta sound degraded so much with the accompanying burst of hiss, the whole experience was spoiled yet again.
The slower tape speed and larger head drum of Beta also meant that any damage to the tape coating would affected playback (the onscreen image) on Beta for longer than an identical amount of damage on a VHS tape.
Choices over which video standard was superior for the consumer weren't limited to video quality alone, and there were different levels in quality between PAL/SECAM and NTSC systems..
I had ample opportunity to see the difference viewing imported US tapes on dual standard VCRs and 50/60 Hz Pal/NTSC monitors like the Sony "Profeel" series popular in TV studios and for high end home use in that era.
video99.co.uk "the oversize VHS tape hobbled its conversion to a studio format" - I'm not sure you can say that, given that all professional Beta formats offered both the Betamax-size "S" cassette (generally used in camcorders and limited to 45min) and the full-size "L" cassette (much larger than VHS and giving up to 124min).
Looking at the evidence, it was mainly Sony's lead in the technology that meant nobody else could really challenge them. The relative handful of broadcasters who bought into M-II (for example) faced reliability, PR and servicing issues, and once those became widely known, why would you buy into M-II instead of Beta-SP if you hadn't already committed to one or the other?
Panasonic? VHS was a JVC invention. You should have known that. Your other information is similarly erroneous, because some major networks like CBS and NBC dumped Betacam in favor of Super VHS (about 150% more resolution).
I think Beta looks better. VHS looks overexposed
Your mom looks overexposed.
@@nicb.1411 Your mom jokes = originaln't
VHS was a poor low quality format, it was not high quality or high end, unlike today's HD video's, VHS looks like the format that never really took off well as DVD did.
@@dilarabegum8671 VHS is not any worse than Beta, they both effectively have the same horizontal resolution. You can only get so much resolution off of a 4:3 interlaced analog magnetic tape format. For the time, VHS was quite special, and a higher end VHS VCR could do stuff that Beta never could.
@@nicb.1411 lmfaoo
Thanks for this! As someone who was too young to remember Beta, I had always wondered how that and VHS compared. I'm always interested to see how our tech could have evolved.
Betamax could only do one hour (upon release) or 4 hours (slowedt speed/longest tape). No wonder customers chose VHS that could record 8-10 hours on the longest tape.
You are so good at explaining complex things clearly and concisely! I'm always amazed.
I have an SLHF1000 from 1986. Hi-Fi, records BI, BII and BIII, editing suite, text labels, pre-roll for recording from another machine...switches other machine's pause button ("s" jack)....and on and on....Still works after all this time. Just not much use for it now, but top of the heap for it's day.
Good machine. The BI on that machine is not the old version (that he mentions in the video) though. That machine recorded in BI S, which was the 6Mhz high band format, which was not compatible with other BI machines.
.... has anyone watched this video in a VR headset yet to see how disoriented they get from the two "eyes" not actually being offset from each other at all?
Would just look like flat 2D if the images are in sync. (Although they are slightly off timewise.)
Great upload! So here is where the half truths get put to rest. Yes, Beta was the superior format...initially. However, when Sony had to half the tape speed from BI to BII in order to get 2 hours on an L-500 cassette (3 hours on L-750) the picture quality advantage was gone. Both were now very comparable. BII, the technical equivalent to VHS's LP mode, produced an image quality only slightly better than VHS on machines of that era. (Remember VHS kept evolving for two more decades and more modern decks produce much better images than a VHS machine of the early 80s.) It was only when the SuperBeta standard came out that quality of the BI speed became achievable on the BII speed. Some higher end models could record in SuperBeta on the BI speed producing a near broadcast quality image. However, it was too little too late and it was clear that recording time and economics far outweighed picture quality in the consumer realm. A tough lesson that Sony had to learn a few times, actually. Thank-you Technology Connection.
SuperBetamax was quickly overrun by Super VHS which hsd 150% more resolution than SB could produce.
@@electrictroy2010 Horizontal resolution, yes...on paper. However, the vertical resolution remained the same resulting in more color saturation than SuperBeta.
I got a chance to compare the two side by side back in the early 2000s when these things were dirt cheap on eBay. Two high end decks; Sony SuperBeta and JVC S-VHS. Both top-end models.
Honestly, most consumers would hardly notice the difference, even side by side.
Despite what Sony's marketing would suggest, the debate was never about image quality. It was recording length. That was the only spec that mattered at the time; 'can I record the game, the movie etc...'
Speed'BII: 2 cm/s SP: 3.3 cm/s. Super Beta 1985 +20% sharpness 250 to 290 horizontal lines.
I love you in depth analysis on these subjects. I never owned a beta deck, but I remember people always telling me it was far superior, I couldn't really tell much of a difference other than the bottom of the VHS recording which a CRT probably wouldn't have seen anyway.
I think the remarkable thing here is that these machines are even producing an image at all. Given the crazy recording technique and timing required, you'd thing the tracking would be off by an unusably large amount 30 years down the line, especially without auto tracking.
Tapes and vhs/beta are still used for archiving. If tapes and machines were stored correctly, they could last a very long time.
Yes tapes are still used in the business world for data back-up. But for video with the machines shown, amazing they still work. I was a fan of Beta. When I couldn't get a Beta machine I lost shows on almost 150 cassettes. All of the TOS and classic Doctor Who that was shown in the US. It sucks.
soupisgdfood . . . But in this case the recordings (which include linear audio and tracking control signals) were only recorded within a few days of playback. If you ever experience a really, really worn VHS or Beta tape where the tracking control information is weak, all kinds of crazy things happen such as the VCR being unsure of what speed to play back at and jump from SP to LP to SLP like crazy.
soupisgdfood You could manually adjust tracking by turning a button
The difference between the two was way more noticable than I was expecting, given the preamble. The beta tape did worse at the high saturated still images, but was significant better at maintaining fine detail in motion, like with the brick path at the beginning or the mulch around the flowers. Those objects looked smoother and were easier to parse on the beta footage than the VHS footage.
Beta's clipping of shadows is very noticeable on the trees at 7:55. That's the major difference I see overall, along with a slightly more compressed picture on Beta. Maybe there's better contrast on Beta, but the shadow clipping removes detail, and this gives the victory to VHS, even with the slightly overexposed look.
I noticed that Beta has better dynamic range, look at the shadows on the flowers. On Beta, you can actually see the shadows. On VHS, you just can't.
I think you're a historical technologist, none of this work has any significance today and yet you still manage to make mundane things interesting, I'm glad people like you exist.
Thanks for making the video. You have answered all the questions I had about these. Thanks to your help, I have decided which one to buy.
Thank you for this video. It is clear now, Lombard, IL feels like a very nice place to live.
4:23 when the video did not end here it tripped me out for a second. I am very well trained on that note by this point
this is where it all began
There's a reason why VHS won this format war back in the days. As a complete noob, that whole "Beta I/II/III but I being disabled"-thing was faaaar too confusing for me to understand, let alone for the average consumer back in the 70s/80s. Reminds me of the DVD+R vs. DVD-R war you did an excellent video about. Again, things like these really put customers off the entire product, and make them look for alternatives.
I have the audio of this on while I'm driving, and I just passed an exploded VHS tape in the road with the tape flying around in one big mass.
Wow! A mega-dose of nerdiness! It's also a reason I enjoy Techmoa as well, a channel you apparently enjoy, too. Thanks!
As a 100% neutral third party (I didn't know that one format was supposed to be superior or inferior to another) and someone who has worked as a professional image retoucher - I will tell you based on the footage seen here, the beta footage was definitely sharper and had more color detail than the VHS footage. I would say if you did a blind test on this you would find a clear trend towards the beta - especially if the people who are in the study also happen to have some experience in photo editing etc.
Based on the comments in the video as well as the user comments, it seems as if there is an age-old war here, with people on the VHS side of the house saying they are the same, and Beta side of the house saying Beta has better image quality. I will go ahead and settle the argument for you - the Beta has better quality (at least given this sample footage). Is it enough to warrant picking one over the other? probably not, but that wasn't the question that was asked.
Betamax could only do one hour (upon release) or 4 hours (slowedt speed/longest tape). No wonder customers chose VHS that could record 8-10 hours on the longest tape.
Betamax looks better on the SMPTE resolution card, but no better on the live images. WORTH Noting is VHS was upgraded to VHS HQ in 1982. This test didn’t make the comparison, but would probably give VHS the edge
Nope. You're only comparing the last set of clips? SLP has a much longer run time than B3. Like for like VHS was better quality. Or equivalent quality with longer run time. Or worse quality with even longer run time. It was the better format.
I've got to say, I think the quality on your VHS recording is way better than what I remember watching growing up. However, we have to take into consideration that the quality of your original recording was pretty stellar and the better the original the better the recorded result will be (in theory). I am not sure why but now I am curious to see what 4k or 8k would look like recorded to VHS vs the 1080p footage you recorded to VHS. Pointless, I know but a curiosity nonetheless. Thanks for the cool video!
I thought the Beta 3 looked a little sharper but more noise. Considering the age of the systems, they both look pretty good. Good video.
Hey folks, just to put over here, the country-like music playing at 5:32 is Swamp Stomp - Silent Partner. I've searched for this song for ages
It sounds so different in digital stereo!
All capture cards deinterlaced? Well I have a 1080i60-capable capture card that I bought some six years ago for a hundred bucks. It doesn't deinterlace. I only bought it to capture some game footage, which I had to deinterlace myself to achieve the target 1080p60 (long before RUclips could even play it). It's odd that you ran into difficulties. Also, it's obvious that Premiere's deinterlacer (to render your 60p) is laughably awful. Can do better with an Avisynth filter.
Agreed! Even cheap USB capturing devices I used never deinterlaced the input videos, unless you activated the deinterlacing option in the capturing software. I usually deinterlace my SD recordings with VirtualDub and a bunch of plug-ins, resulting in decent 640×480p50 footages (PAL).
Perhaps the difficulty lies in the capture software itself, rather than the actual capture device. Majority of the pack-in software seems to capture 30p and deinterlace by default, either blending or throwing out the other field. I second Avisynth using the Yadif 2X filter for really nice results.
The software I used had the option to capture raw. Wouldn't have bought the card if it wasn't an option. That's really what should have been done here, but it doesn't seem to have caused too much of an issue either way.
Asterra2 nice to meet a fellow avisynth user. virtualdub + avisynth > any commercial software ever, we are the true geeks lol.
Hello avisynth and virtualdub geeks. QTGMC/MSU deinterlacer user here!
For old machines, the video quality was far better than i was expecting. I actually owned a beta player back when i was a kid. I wish i knew what i did with it.
VHS is overexposed in some scenes for some reason.
I'm not sure if it's overexposed or just way, way lower in dynamic range than the Beta footage, but I definitely noticed that as well.
I honestly like the VHS color and brightness better.
God I still remember how excited I was with a new vhs player, it had a barcode reader in the remote, audio dubbing. That was so much fun, we used to do voice over on the fly. Vhs looks brighter and more colourful but the beta is smother.
Family were professional photographers years ago and God back then editing was laborious. My cousin told me titles had to be inserted by hand frame by frame. I guess they used an overly but still. We were forbidden to enter the dark room as some chemicals there could kill. They also, at the very start had to colour in by hand. To think about what we have now in our pockets would fill rooms back then and cost a small fortune.
Man I’d love a list of all the songs you’ve used, some of them are amazing.
One of them is
Floaters by Jimmy Fantonez (I think that's how you spell it)
One scene I did see a slight difference is where you're going up the stairs the sign on the cement wall is not stretched out and washed out as much on the beta b3 transfer as it is on the vhs so the sign does show up much clearer.
You need to work on your production technique when using your gimbal. Hold it as if you were carrying a spoon of water and float your arm. As it is your arm is locked and you are defeating the gimbal effect with the bounce of your walk.
I wonder how much of the quality was thrown away by the DVD conversion (and the composite/RF signal, but would they even accept a component or S-Video input?) before it even got to the Beta/VHS recorders.
Beta wow and flutter + dance beat = vaporwave.
Patrick Working and a video that may not have been renovated in 40 years is a good reference 😂
I remember my dad swore by betamax, even in the mid-80's when it was clear that beta had lost it.
We didn't get a VHS until around 1986. Until then we had three betamax VCR's in our house; one in my bedroom, so I could watch tapes in my room, and two in the living room, so we could rent movies and record them over onto another tape, essentially stealing them :)
When we finally got VHS, we got rid of one of the beta players, and kept the one in my room and one downstairs. Then we would rent movies on VHS, record them over to betamax, and we could watch them either downstairs or in my room.
My dad was a whiz with this stuff back then. Once scart came along though, and especially DVD, he just seemed to lose all capacity to deal with this stuff, and I had to do it.
It was a pretty big gap, I think most people struggled with the jump to dvd.
The video that introduced me to Technology Connections ^^
Great comparison! Plenty of shots to show off moire, etc.
Debunks yet another trope in the format wars.
VHS seems more washed out and BETA's colours seem more vibrant. Maybe it's just my imagination though !
Nope. I saw exactly what you've described.
It performed better in brightly lit scenes, so I concur.
Agreed...
I see better detail and colors on the beta version but it's only a very slight upgrade
Can't believe the amount of hardwork you have done to put this video together! Please keep up the great work. Thanks.
Two of betamax' advantages, the color reproduction and the contrast, is less of a factor on LCD's than on CRT's. With the deeper color and the true black of CRT's those differences were visible.
Also, in the low res days the extra horizontal lines offered (250 vs 240) did make a difference.
Anyway, sans the CRT-experience I think this is a great real life test representing what many early adopters experienced, it is, however, horribly flawed if you want to asses if 'Beta really was better'.
(Just a note: Beta 1 did not really go away (outside low end models), it was renamed. I cannot remeber to what though.)
Very interesting comparison. We are going to produce a similar comparison on our channel: the match "VHS vs VIDEO2000". Two methods: 1) creating a video in DVCAM and transferring it via composite to the recorders; 2) recording the same program via DVB-T decoder. Probably these are the cleanest signals the two recorders have seen in their whole life. Thank you, the two old vcrs (RCA & Sony) are really fantastic!
The Indian Head test pattern at 9:08 says it all. The old Beta machine did both the recording *and* playback. The newer HQ VHS machine did the recording and the standard VHS machine did the playback. Imagine how little detail there would be if it did both!! I can remember how blurry and washed out educational programs looked at school on 26 inch CRT TVs on carts with the huge VCRs just like the RCA VDT-600... and that was when they were less than 5 years old.
The main difference is the luminance shift, which is caused by machine set-up. So VHS picture is more washed out and that caused that some details are lost in white. But the resolution is similar as you can see in H/V test lines.
This is such an excellent work you did here. It's such a shame no one was around to do that for people agonizing over which standard to chose :) Incredibly good video!
It's difficult to make a visual comparison when you doubled each field (ie. used bob deinterlacing) for the upload. There are better ways of doing 30i->60p conversions. Otherwise, good info and presentation.
When I was a young boy we had a shiny new Betamax and I now know one thing for sure:- who ever waxes lyrical about Betamaxes never owned one. The tapes were only an hour long, so you couldn't record a entire movie on one tape. And, unless you timed it to perfection changing tapes during one of the late commercial breaks you'd miss five minutes for the movie. As for movie rentals, you'd go to the store were there would be wall to wall, floor to ceiling movies and low and behold the very movie you had set your little heart on would be there. You'd take it to the counter and ask those immortal words... "do you have this in Betamax?" and with a shake of the head the store assistant would crush your six year old hopes into the dust. But, trying to keep your composure you'd ask "where...(wobble of your bottom lip)... are your Betamax tapes" and the assistant would wave his hand dismissively towards the far wall, and for a beautiful moment you thought he'd meant the entire wall of videos and your hopes would raise high only for them to be dashed once more. "No" the assistant would grumble "there". And with dread realisation you would suddenly see that he was pointing at a tiny little shelf with three dusty old tapes no one had ever wanted to rent in the first place... I'm not bitter, I'm not. Really I'm not, I'm not bitter! It's not as though I've been carrying this trauma round with me for all this time... No. I'll be all right... I'll be okay. Beeeetaaaamax! (imagine Captain Kirk screaming Khaaan) :-)
I owned--and still have a few--Betamax machines (Betamax, SuperBeta, and ED Beta), among them the SL-HF1000 and 2100. Both recorded at B1 speed and the image was stunning. Memories.
Don't be misled by the VHS-HQ moniker. VHS-HQ was a set of enhancements that really did improve VHS quality. But VCR makers only had to use a couple of features from the HQ set in order to be allowed to use the HQ branding. They were not required to use the whole HQ set and so even with the HQ logo on the box, you never really knew exactly which HQ features were actually incorporated and which ones were left out. As a result, just because it says VHS-HQ doesn't mean you can compare it to another HQ machine. It may not be the same HQ, and the end recording may or may not benefit from the enhancements depending on what the machine maker decided to implement.
I thought the beta had sharper image quality in many of the scenes.
Agreed. Definitely sharper. You can especially see when it comes to the finer details in things like dirt grain and the grain in things like granite.
I got a completely stripped down, rebuilt and restored Sanyo VTC M40 BetaMax Hifi deck from 1984 for my Christmas present last year. All the work was carried out by an ex sanyo engineer it was recapped, capstans replaced, belts replaced, motor was also modified to operate quieter than standard. The Hifi sound is pretty incredible for an analogue format, many claiming its on par with reel to reel.
One thing immediately obvious to me though is how far more stable it is in keeping a good solid picture without dropouts, little white artefacts, noise, or jerkiness etc. By comparison my much later 1995 VHS system made by Bang and Olufsen suffers from these issue as did all other VHS machines I’ve ever used. Having never used Betamax when it was brand new to the market. I definitely would’ve betted on that winning the format wars, it just seems to look far more stable a picture. Keep in mind these are on Sony UHG Beta tapes that are 30 plus years old as well, not brand new stock I’m using either.
As I am in the UK the PAL version of Beta HIFI was also quite a bit better than the NTSC version of Beta Hifi. PAL Machines had a separate Hifi audio head, which the NTSC machines didn’t have.
I'd like to see a laser disk comparison if possible.
MrShadow12622 you don’t ask for much do you?
Laserdisc *not* “Laser Disk”
@@EnergeticWaves well you can clearly see one of the pioneer dvd/ld units above his vcr in a close up.
I mean try the original home video release of Back to the Future on vhs, beta and laserdisc.
For what reason? Just looking at the specs, VHS is 3 megahertz bandwidth and laserdisc is 5 megahertz. Obvious win.
Although SUPER VHS versus laserdisc might be worthwhile. Specwise they are identical. Would be curious to see a side by side
Tech tip regarding 1:43 -- always store your videotapes vertically (like Fiddler on the Roof) and not flat (like Patton and The Man Who Knew Too Much) -- the weight of the tape resting on the tape edge will cause problems and damaged edges over time. Best to have the tape weight not on its edge but flat on the spool wrap instead.
More serious issue is humidity causing the media to flake off the tape. Also magnetic crosstalk between tape layers causing interference when played back.
Judging from this comparison, I would say that BetaMax had better dynamic range and better handling of saturation.
Look at the Indian Head card again. Compare the actual Indian head between the two; BetaMax has a clear picture while VHS is blown out.
Either BetaMax is superior, or this is a poorly constructed comparison.
I think the general consensus always was that it had slightly superior video quality - but only slightly, and it's cost and limitations weren't worth the slight quality gain to the average consumer.
VHS was “completely” horrible? No what’s horrible is Betamax could only do one hour (upon release) or 4 hours (slowedt speed/longest tape). No wonder customers chose VHS that could record 8-10 hours on the longest tape.
Wow, you're from Lombard!? I take my kids to that dairy queen every week. Thanks for her another awesome video.
Beta 1 recording option is hidden on the back of your machine ;)
@Loki Heimdallr That's just for playback.
When movies were released on Betamax, did they play at Beta 1 or 2?
Peter P 2
I was gonna be like "but are the clocks set to the same time?!" Then they were, damn it.
sad that I missed the exact date but happy 5th birthday to your Channel Music™
Doing some research after watching Cowboy Bebop. Great video.
That music and the train and the old video quality all make me feel like a kid again watching some kind of pbs program about trains.
that guy who pointed out the issues with the earlier video, must be really fun at parties.
Hey.. In a previous comment I questioned you about why you used composite video instead a better quality cable, but I didn't research enough to know that video encoded on VHS were in fact in composite like you said.. Sorry to question about your comparison saying it was unfair.. Looking at the video again, my opinion of its content has changed.. Thank you for the great channel man.. keep up the great work.
Beta 3 looks best More lifely colors and higher contrast.
Gigidag77 FURRY! OwO
too late for me, i got yiffed a long time ago, now i can fit in with the feminists' multiple genders (furry is a gender right)
lol no it isn't a gender
Thanks for taking the time to compare these! It was obvious from the start that both will look awful by today's standards, but it's nice to see how they compare :)
But the quality is also governed by the TV system it is based on a PAL Beta VCR does have a superior picture to an NTSC Beta machine due to the method used for encoding the video signal and error correction in the signal, but the same can be said for a VHS unit based on PAL instead of NTSC, if your interested I have a PAL B/G VHS VCR your more than welcome to have. I just have to dig it out of storage.
Encoding? Betamax and VHS are not digital!
Marcus Schulz encoding is still the same term used to record an electronic signal on an analogue Video recording and Playback Device. Encoding is a form of putting a signal into a means of transport, NTSC, PAL and SECAM are all forms of analogue encoding schemes for TV transmission, and video signal reproduction.
analogue tv signals were encoded, they had the colour and sound encoded into the same signal along with timing..... video signals were basically the same but recorded slightly differently, the VHS / BETA players had the encoding hardware needed to convert the signal to something a tv could make sense of.
That is true, when I first went to Europe in the early 90s, I could easily see that PAL and SECAM were higher resolution. However because my eyes were accustomed to 60 hz NTSC, 50 hz PAL had a strange strobing quality that took me a week or so to get used to.
31 frames per second to 25 frames per second takes most people an hour or two. Using my 4 family members as the sample. They were visiting me in my Pal country from NTSC USA.
PS: They all prefered PAL.
Bottom line- The Beta user was much more quality conscious and used up significant tape to obtain an at the time highest quality image possible. The VHS user was only impressed by the significant recording time on VHS tape and could have cared less about quality of image. At the end VHS had somewhat caught up, but by then Sony was more interested in the original HD system from Japan around 1983 or something. Our government deceided the US was better off to develop our own system in increments, leading to 25 yrs of average to decent quality video formats, until the original, crappy HD format was introduced. We could have had 4K in the 80's the technology was there, but the incremental introduction continues to today.
I had a beta while stationed in Germany and I prefer it. I always preferred it. in my opinion it had a much better picture and audio.
As I recall, the layout of the tracks on the Beta tape gave it a significant edge over VHS, when the tape was damaged or really old. The audio tracks, in particular I believe, were near the center, which kept the audio from getting fouled by the normal friction the edge of the tape experienced. I may be wrong: It's been a long time. lol
VHS looks a bit brighter.
Other than that, I can't tell the difference between the two.
You have clearly put a LOT of time and effort in to this video. Good job. :]
This is one of the best most underrated channels
I was a total Beta snob growing up, but now I can barely tell a difference. The beta has a little more clarity, but it isn't terribly noticeable.
Maybe my eyes are just spoiled by 1080p
superbeta was quite a bit better than normal VHS,, but Super VHS and SuperBeta pretty much looked the same as well
The difference was that SuperBeta was an improvement on the same format, so was backwards compatible. Super VHS was a different format. So, Super VHS tapes could not be played in a regular VHS machine. Super VHS also required Super VHS tapes to record in that format, whereas SuperBeta used the same tapes as regular Beta.
There was a higher quality Beta format called EDBeta, which did require the use of metal tapes, which were also not backwards compatible. That format was much better quality than Super VHS. But neither format caught on.
I did/do have an EDBeta machine by the way.
@@my3dviews Superbeta is more similar to vhs HQ
SuperVHS has 400+ lines. SuperBeta is band limited to 300. Also you can play SVHS or SVHS-C in standard VHS units, but without the higher quality. JVC made that modification for convenience.
Oh hey! It's the music from the "Remember these fish??!" video that didn't exist yet when you made this video!
can you compare vcd to vhs?
vcd is a piece of shit
Check out Techmoan's video about VCD disks.
George Moore VCD was actually really great when viewed on a classic picture tube tv. Even though vcds when played on a computer showed tonnes of mpeg artifacts (you could see the picture has a lot of blocks). that blockiness did not show on a crt because those tv screens didn't have the color fidelity to render the VCD accurately. So for it's day and on the screen it was intended for VCD looked really good. DVDs didn't look but a tiny bit better on these TV's because again the tv didn't have the resolution to show the difference. On a PC, you could see that DVDs were better than VCD because it had more detail and better color resolution. But even DVDs looked bad on PC's until the graphic card companies started creating better chips or software to smooth out the mpeg artifacts. If you've ever watched a full length movie compressed down to about 300 Meg's or less, that is about the same quality as a VCD. Although a VCD had more data capicity than that, the codec used was much less efficient.
but vcd has only 352x240 pixels resolution, which is half of NTSC or PAL...and DVDs have the Full resolution. So TVs had more lines and therefore it was visible. Older TVs may have been unsharper, but still the amount of lines stays the same. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_CD
CmonSoundz You're absolutely right about the resolution but a VCD played back on a crt tv looked almost s good as any DVDs. It was only when played back on a computer that the difference in resolution really showed up.
Lombard! Something always seemed familiar about your videos, like they were being made less than twenty minutes away from where I live or something LOL. Greetings from Roselle. Great content, always entertaining and informative.
And the Beta had a switch that allowed you to record audio only. And that audio was superior to any analog audio available at the time.
Whatever is cheaper, that's the direction my parents went. Still remember the relatively small beta section at Video Den in Gettysburg.
The beta is better than the final product. Seems familiar.
*cough E3 cough*
An opinion from someone who was born and raised in Japan and grew up there from the 70's through 80's: I can tell you that Betamax offered qualitative superior video quality early on but very specifically when paired with a Sony Trinitron TV/Monitor. But not everybody owned a Trinitron so the difference in quality between Betamax and VHS became far less important. When people started buying multiple television sets for their homes, usually there was one, high quality TV set - normally in the living room but all of the other TV sets around the house were often smaller, cheaper, and sometimes not even in color. For the average consumer, quantity mattered more, and being able to shove as many pirated movies and television shows onto one VHS tape was the key selling point. Super VHS and its ADAT's digital audio multitrack functionality sealed Betamax's obsolescence.