So, you’ve found yourself looking at a side-by-side comparison of Beta and VHS in 2017.
Awesome!
All kidding aside, here’s a disclaimer: It’s not exactly easy to find a Beta machine
in stellar shape.
These recordings were made with my best Beta VCR, which is well over 30 years old now.
This video has been re-uploaded to address an unfair advantage the VHS footage had in
the previous version: the age of the VCR.
I didn’t see this as a huge problem given it was a standard VHS unit, but user
did rightly point out that the newer VHS machine has VHS HQ enabled, and it has
digital signal processing which would give it an edge.
So, I set up the RCA dinosaur from 1979 and recorded the output from that machine, and
replaced the original VHS footage.
I didn’t re-record the VHS tape with the RCA machine because it’s doesn’t record
so well, so it’s possible that the VHS footage has the tiniest of edges given the tape’s
been recorded on a newer machine, but still it’s being played back on a venerable antique.
Note however that the audio from the original upload is still being used for the VHS segments.
And with that out of the way, let’s continue.
This footage comes from a simple stroll around my local area (yes this is Downtown Lombard
and Lilacia Park, and I’m surprised how many people recognized it so quickly).
I shot this at 60 frames per second in full HD on my OnePlus 3, using a gimbal for a stable
image in the outdoor scenes.
I then made a DVD of this footage, then popped that DVD into a Playstation 2 and recorded
from the PS2’s composite video output to a Beta machine and a VHS machine.
This is the Beta Machine, it’s a Toshiba which brags about its front-loading system.
The VHS machine used to record onto the tape was this Panasonic DMR-ES40V.
I recorded the segments twice on both formats, at SP and SLP on VHS, and Beta 2 and 3 on
Beta. I did not record on Beta 1 because the vast majority of machines from as early as 1979
have Beta 1 disabled due to its impractical use of tape.
A 1 hour tape length wasn't long enough, and Sony decided it just wasn't worth it anymore
So I don't even own a machine capable of recording at Beta 1
and the vast majority of Beta machines throughout the format war could not record at Beta 1 speed.
I disabled HiFi sound on the VHS machine to ensure you are hearing the great mono linear
soundtrack.
After recording the segments, I used the DVD recorder function of the Panasonic to capture
the video from both VCRs over the same composite cable, and I used this machine for good reason.
All video capture cards that I’ve used produce garbage output because they insist on de-interlacing,
producing 30p footage that looks like crap.
This DVD recorder doesn’t bother with De-interlacing and instead produces a glorious NTSC 29.97
frames per second, interlaced output.
Importantly, it can record onto DVD-RAM discs, which I then popped in my laptop.
The Panasonic unit writes .vro files on the DVD ram disc, and for some reason Sony Movie
Studio can open these files and understand them.
Premiere cannot.
So good thing I keep my laptop around.
I then rendered each of these output videos as a new NTSC standard mp4, at a ridiculously
high bit-rate to ensure all the analog smoothness is captured, and then onto a flash drive and
over to my desktop for editing in Premiere.
In the last video, I uploaded at 30p, and Premiere didn’t do a good job deinterlacing
that time, either.
This upload is at 60p, and it looks much better.
Note that you may have to go full-screen on a PC to actually get the 60p footage.
I will blow these up and even to some split-screen magic, but if you’re watching fullscreen
on even a 1366x768 display, you’re getting all the detail possible.
Trust me, this is the clip scaled at 100% in a 1080p render.
See?
So, again due to the age of the Toshiba machine, you’ll have to forgive some of its problems,
like the occasional signal dropout.
But for the most part, the image is stable.
I’ll shut up for a moment and let the video speak for itself.
I’ll be switching the audio source back and for for your viewing pleasure.
These stills are some royalty free images filled with color to show how color rendering
compares between the two formats.
Both VHS and Beta use a color-under encoding technique, and the resolution of the color
is quite poor compared to the image resolution.
Both formats struggle with red, but this Beta machine seems to be doing worse.
That could easily be just this particular machine.
The Indian head test card helps compare image resolution by comparing the converging line
patterns.
It’s pretty similar.
On both formats the SMPTE color bars look pretty gnarly, particularly with magenta and
the red-blue border.
First off, the image is not noticeably sharper than VHS, at least I can’t see a significant
difference.
There’s nothing about the output from the Beta machine that says to me, this is superior
to VHS.
Aside from its occasional dropouts, it looks nearly identical.
EXCEPT, in this footage, look at the sky.
This is the so-called fingerprint effect that was present on virtually all Beta 2 recordings.
It’s not always visible, but it’s always there.
The Rise and Fall of Beta piece I referenced in the previous video discusses this phenomenon.
But, here’s one area where Beta does visibly beat VHS.
The recording at Beta 3 is noticeably sharper than the SLP recording.
Sound is also slightly better, which would make sense as the linear tape speed on Beta
3 is higher than SLP.
The Beta machine which made these recordings has a high amount of wow and flutter in the
audio at Beta 3, and that is probably due to bad filter capacitors in the capstan motor
power supply.
However, as we exhaustively discussed in the last video, comparing Beta 3 to SLP is almost
wrong, as recording time is comparable being Beta 3 and VHS LP.
SLP provided recording time far far longer than any Beta 3 deck.
There appear to be no Beta machines capable of recording at all three speeds, with Beta
1 being disabled all the way back in 1979.
So to conclude, Beta 2 looks pretty close to VHS SP.
Which makes sense, as Beta 2 is in reality equivalent to VHS LP.
Remember, Beta 1 was sharper than VHS SP, but as Beta 2 was the technical companion
of VHS LP, the quality got pretty similar.
And again, Beta 1 (the technical companion to VHS SP) was disabled on the vast majority
of Beta decks.
As I said in the last videos, by disabling Beta 1, Sony got rid of much of the picture
advantage Beta had over VHS.
But I think they had to kill it off, after all a 2 hour base recording time on an L-500
tape sounds acceptable, but a 1 hour time on Beta 1 sounds almost useless.
I’ll let this video play out, but before I go I thought I would mention the technical
cousin of Beta known as Betacam.
A lot of comments on the past video are saying that Beta never really lost the format war
because it lived on in the professional realm.
That’s not correct, though, because Betacam is a completely different format from consumer
Betamax.
Yeah, betacam cassettes are mostly the same as your standard Beta tape, but you can’t
play any Betacam recording on a standard issue consumer Beta deck.
Also, in the professional realm, the Betacam standard was amended to include a physically
larger Betacam L cassette which contained more tape, because at this point sony finally
threw in the towel and acknowledged that the standard Beta cassette was too small.
The professional market would benefit greatly by using the same basic cassette throughout
its iterations, and since professional equipment is pushing into new-car pricing territory,
cost was never too much of a barrier.
Betacam eventually became fully digital, even HD.
But again, it doesn’t belong in a discussion on the format war, because Betacam was never
marketed to consumers.
Anyway, Thanks for watching!