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After 40 Years, Sony Will Stop Producing BetaMax Tapes in March

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday January 19 2016, @02:46AM   
from the how-is-this-still-a-thing??? dept.

From WTOP news: http://wtop.com/money/2016/01/happy-birthday-video-betamax-is-still-a-thing/

After 40 years, Sony will end production of BetaMax tapes in March.

"Sony introduced the consumer-friendly Betamax recorder, a suitcase-sized machine that recorded up to two hours of video on a cassette tape off of broadcast or cable signals, in 1975. And that ushered in era of the VCR. (That stands for video cassette recorder, millennials.)"

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Original Submission

• Meh, not obscure enough. (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:20AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @03:20AM (#291390)

  How about 2-inch quad [wikipedia.org]? A video of an Ampex VR-1200B VTR being loaded and played [youtube.com].

  Or if you don't count 2-inch quad because you can't scrub forward and backward, there's 1-inch Type C videotape, also in reel-to-reel format [wikipedia.org]. Here's an Ampex VPR-3 VTR in action [youtube.com].

  Also, you can still buy Betacam tapes from some places [google.com]. While Betamax faltered in the consumer market, Betacam was a staple in the ENG (Electronic News Gathering) market.

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