Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for March 10, 2022

Betamax did have a better quality for the films but it was just one hour short of success….

No Sony product was ever the ‘future’

Sony also had a format called Betacam and later, Betacam SP. It was a professional format that used the same cassette design as Betamax but with a higher quality of tape and a faster speed. It was pretty much the TV industry standard throughout the 90s into the early 2000s.

I’ve a Betamax video of a pantomime I appeared in, but never seen, in the early 80s, that I need to convert to USB MP4… Has anyone used such a service, they can recommend?

I have a friend who had done something like that. But with the VIDEO 2000….Nice to know that Norm and Jay knows each other since childhood. If that is Jay.

Queen was hugely successful, but I never got into them. Freddie was just a little too weird for me? I dunno what it was.

With a repair manual and enough belts you can make them last forever. I have several 1990 vintage VCRs along with belts and manuals. Mostly museum pieces nowadays.

I have a device that will actually play both VHS tapes and DVDs. Even better it can copy one to the other! AND I can watch it all on my TV at the same time!

Betamax a real bust!

“Do Notte Buye Betamacks.”

Agnes Nutter, Witch.

well at least its not the old laser disk ( snerk )

About 1 hour ago Mudd said,

Thank you,so much,to you guys for this toon and commenting on stuff. Peace. :>)

Remember when it competed with VHS? I feel sorry for all those people who bought Beta Max over VHS. What, did it last about a year or were there some die-hard Beta Max users still trying to find Beta movies?

Snerks… I bought out an entire video rental shop of beta tapes and 2 machines

Say what ya want – Laser Disc was the best! Superior sound and picture and when ya had to flip it over it it was the perfect time for a bathroom break and more snacks!

Betamax was the superior format, but Sony marketed them here the way they did in Japan – touting “quality” over “quantity”.

Americans wanted a format that could record a whole American “football” game on one tape – quality be damned!

The “Panasonic Video Home System” could do that though it usually gave you a headache from watching it – but Americans didn’t care.

“Betamax” lasted over 20 years – in Japan – where “quality” has ALWAYS won out over quantity – here, in America, V.H.S. NEVER achieved the picture quality of "Beta’ even with “super” V.H.S. (remember THAT?).

And now we have “streaming” which is barely adequate – if you live in a large metropolitan area, and if you can afford the "connection fees, and if your tastes run to mainstream programming, and if you don’t mind believing what you want to watch will always be available, and if…, and if…, and if…!

I live in “the sticks” of New Mexico, and even though I pay for a.D.S.L.; at night we deal with those annoying little “buffering” pauses, so I refuse to watch anything streaming outside of recipe videos.

Digital Video Disk is my preferred way to view video programing, and I will stick with that, thank-you-very-much! (And, yes, I have DirecTV. for my ephemeral television watching – but the older I get, the more I appreciate something called “reading” which you do with an instrument called a “book” – amazing technology, that!)

Ya know, I never DID buy one of those…..

I think of Betamax as being the same time as the Iranian Revolution (1979) – it was mentioned by Howard Hessman on Saturday Night Live, and was the first time I had heard of it. I can’t really relate to the comic since I was almost 30 at the time. At least my kids were born after home video became popular, so I’ve got those early records. It makes me think of a friend who, when his first child was born, invested heavily in a fancy Super 8 setup with sound and a bunch of extra stuff (I have no idea what), in about 1978, or just before home video. He later tried to get someone to buy it off him for a while, with no luck!

I have that Queen concert t-shirt! It was from ‘The Game’ Tour. My shirt is a medium and there’s no chance of me comfortably wearing it anymore, but it’s in a closet in my guest room with a couple of dozen other concert T’s.

The concert I attended was at the Richfield Coliseum in Ohio. Arguably the best concert I ever attended. That was back in the days when tickets and concert T’s were affordable. A kid with a minimum wage job could easily afford to see several concerts a year.

My brother bought a Beta video player, thinking it would be the hot new way to watch movies. Boy, was he wrong. He was really into tech, built himself a Heathkit computer, was working on a program to convert photographs into cross-stitch patterns, etc. This was back in early 1980’s.

I still have one that works and the camera.

We used our Betamax just for recording our shows. It finally died in 1995. By the time my parents could afford the latest whatever the next whatever came out and it was too expensive. But, we did have VHS too. Oh, if anyone watches M.Knight’s The Servant on Apple+, they had to find an ancient Betamax to play a tape that was crucial to the plot. And, somehow, they found one right quickly. Lol