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The end of a disappointing era: Betamax finally dies

My mother still has four Betas sitting at her house. In fact at age 13 I bought the family's first VCR and it was a Beta. ( I know your all surprised that Matt would choose a losing a video format). But at the time I thought hmmmm smaller tapes with a far better picture quality than VHS people would be stupid to buy VHS.

Sad but then the porn industry chose VHS and well my first experience in dealing with a society who were too stupid to chose the better format as they were too busy with their dicks in their hands.

Then came HD-DVD vs Bluray and once again I thought wow HD-DVD has the better picture quality at first than Bluray and so I placed my bets again that people wouldn't be dumb enough to make the same mistake twice. Sigh they were luckily Bluray finally got their shit together and now are just as good as HD-DVD in PQ but not before I lost 100.00 to a mocking Flint who every so often will rub the salt in a still festering wound.

I've learned when it comes to anything A/V most of the world is just too stupid to know good from bad (cough cough Bose cough cough) but if another format war comes out, this time I'll just sit back and wait to see what the morons of society have deemed better before I choose again.
 
Dammit, Matt! Stop rewriting history!

HD-DVD was never "better" than Bluray. It was about 6 months earlier to market, was selling players at a massive loss to make them stupid cheap, and support double sided discs where one side as DVD and the other HD. That's it.

Do I need to post that photo of Pinky and the Brain again?

Beta was better, but VHS had a large consorteum of manufactures supporting it while Beta had three to four manufacturers, only. Also, it was nearly two years later to market, and the movie rental stores were packed with VHS tapes by the time Beta was truly viable. I remember going to rent movies and the Beta section was one row of shelves while the rest of the store was VHS. I can see why VHS won.
 
Flint said:
Beta was better, but VHS had a large consorteum of manufactures supporting it while Beta had three to four manufacturers, only. Also, it was nearly two years later to market, and the movie rental stores were packed with VHS tapes by the time Beta was truly viable. I remember going to rent movies and the Beta section was one row of shelves while the rest of the store was VHS. I can see why VHS won.
Click to expand...

My parents had a Beta. It was likely because of the sound fidelity. I definitely remember going to the video store and realizing none of the movies my brother and I really wanted to watch were available for Betamax. When that's the case, of course people will buy VHS.

As for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray, the only advantages HD-DVD had were the price and time to market. Blu-Ray had it whipped on capacity and participating companies. It was easy to see why it lost.
 
IIRC, The Library of Congress hordes players of dead formats in order to have working machines and spare parts to make digital copies of old material. I'm not sure how old the picture was but I saw a room with several racks of BetaMax machines
 
Don't forget this war that Sony also caused:
CD+R vs CD-R
DVD+R vs DVD-R
 
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