General Chat

BBC Archives

All VHS and Betamax tapes are being digitized to save them from humidity. However, there is not enough life into the heads and all players appear to have been purchased on eBay. This is why BBC is now collaborating with IBM to rebuild tape players heads.

Following the canning of John Linwood CTO ( £ 280K pa) and the abandonment of the digitisation project ( £ 98M spent ) this has become urgent.

So now you know what happens to yr license fee. So help out auntie, do you have an old betamax player in the loft ?

Yes, player with the tapes and OH wont part with them for anything.

My mum still uses at least four VHS recorders attached to different TV's around the house.....told her it would be much easier with Sky HD...but she wont have it :-D

I know she still has her old betamax aswell which cost over £600 in the early 80s

Yes the Betamax was the top of the range but discontinued very quickly if I remember correctly

Betamax was far superior - my father bought one of the first Sony ones which cost an arm and a leg. That made it harder for him to change tapes until he mastered the remote control (ie me).
But VHS became the format of choice, mainly because it was cheaper.

The professionals always used Betamax and it is only now going out of use in favour of fully digital capture. One of the reasons was the far superior luminence available on Betamax.

here is a piece on the transition from tape to digital which may interest those with a technical bent.

http://www.cybercollege.com/tvp048.htm

That the Beeb has sunk £ 98 million into a black hole and that it is about to junk even more of our telly archive does not seem to bother anybody overmuch.

Philips brought their large, square cassette to the market very early on. Quality was very good.

In the mid 1980s Philips introduced their smaller video cassette that was between Beta and VHS in size.

The beauty with this latest tape was simplicity itself - it could be turned over like an audio cassette to record the other side!

Quality was also very good - as is the norm with Philips' products.