Comparing Beta & VHS on Quality: Was Beta Really Better? 

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 !

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

I watched a video of 90s recorded in HD and the colours were still muted 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".

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

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 "RU-vidr" 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."

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.

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 RU-vid 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").

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.

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.

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

That's what I saw, higher contrast.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I bet you loved Babylon 5 and seaQuest (CGI done with Amiga). Not in real time of course. Prerendered.

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).

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.

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.

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...'

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

One of them is Floaters by Jimmy Fantonez (I think that's how you spell it)

Would just look like flat 2D if the images are in sync. (Although they are slightly off timewise.)

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

The Betamax video head disc has a larger diameter compared to VHS, which translates in a bit higher max frequency. In this example the Betamax appears to have slightly more details.

The larger video head disc translates into a higher frequency for the baseband because of the higher writing speed of the video heads for the same rotational speed (1800 RPM for NTSC). That said, with regard to video quality, Beta was superior to VHS _on paper and in technical testing_ ... and that superiority wasn't overly dramatic. In practical use, many people likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference, especially through blind testing.

Having converted a number of vhs camcorder tapes to dvd using a high end S-VHS deck, vhs overall just was never that good. Even the tapes that looked the best always seemed to have some blur filter applied, on top of the resolution limitations. Even if Betamax had the same 200+ vertical line resolution (I think it had slightly more), there were other ways it could have and probably was better than vhs. Such as how the beta footage here looks less washed out with fewer details lost in bright areas.

I never had a beta machine but did have numerous VHS machines and they all used a comb filter and I always wished I could have disabled that "feature".

Actually, you would have needed that comb filter if you were recording something on Beta or VHS. Neither VHS and Beta were true composite video. Instead, you had a B&W baseband with a separate color carrier downconverted into a lower resolution. Hence, VHS and Beta were Y/C separated; separate luminance and chrominance signals. Otherwise, the comb filter isn't used for playback.

Patrick Working and a video that may not have been renovated in 40 years is a good reference 😂

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.

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

240p videogames actually broadcast at 480i to be compatible with the official NTSC standard. TVs of the 70s/80s would show garbage if fed anything else.

So in other words, VCRs would have no problem recording them. I have some of those old games recorded on VHS (connected RF or composite video to VCR input).

@@electrictroy2010 I know it would work, I used to record my snes on vhs all the time, I just meant for video comparison

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

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!

this is where it all began

@Loki Heimdallr That's just for playback.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

Also, quick question, does anyone still make tapes of either format?? My local Sears still has blank 6Hr tapes listesd as available on their website.