Today we’re going to talk about one of Sony’s most ingenious technological advancements
that went absolutely nowhere.
And it’s been sitting right behind me for the past few weeks.
This is Betamovie, Sony’s groundbreaking product that quite literally is the invention
of the camcorder.
This very model, the BMC-110, was the first all-in-one camera and videocassette recorder,
released in 1983.
This camcorder promised consumers a lightweight and easy-to-use product that would change
the way you make home movies.
The only problem is that it’s absolutely terrible.
OK, no, it’s not a terrible product from a design or engineering perspective.
I actually quite like the design, especially the addition of the RGB dots that Sony liked
to throw on all their Trinitron TV sets.
Lots of manufacturers did this sort of thing to denote that it was a color video product.
But Sony stuck with their classic ovals, and I like it.
The problem with this device is that it was essentially no more functional than a hand-cranked
8mm movie camera.
And you’ll see what I mean in a moment.
So first, a little history.
The reason this is called a camcorder is that it is a single device, with a camera integrated
into a videocassette recorder.
In this case, integrated is a little generous
- bolted on seems more appropriate -
but until this very product was released, making and recording home movies onto video tape would
require a portable VCR and a separate camera.
And these portable VCRs weren’t really all that portable.
Weighing in between 10 and 25 pounds, these VCRs were lugged around with a shoulder strap,
and your other shoulder would support a composite camera.
Sounds fun.
In creating Betamovie, Sony sought to create a single device containing both the VCR and
the camera.
Thus, the camcorder was born.
Now, I have a strong feeling that Sony created the word “camcorder”.
They referred to a lot of their audio tape products as “tapecorders”, and generally
liked to drop the Re in recorder wherever possible, so it really seems like camcorder
was a word right up their alley.
But, none of the labels on here say anything but “Betamovie”, and the etymology of
the word camcorder isn’t attributed to Sony from what I can tell, but I still find it
unlikely not to be a word of their invention.
Anyway to get ourselves back on track here, one of the greatest hurdles to designing a
device like this is that of miniaturization.
The rotary head drum, required to create a high bandwidth signal on video tape, is quite
large in a normal Betamax machine.
Normally, the tape is threaded 180 degrees around the drum.
The beta tape transport may seem very odd to those who have never seen it before, but
fundamentally it’s similar to VHS--the tape is just wrapped around it in a very different fashion.
Two spinning heads on opposite sides of the drum write to the tape by tracing a diagonal
path from edge to edge, and there’s a near seamless gap from one head to the next.
In a normal Betamax or VHS deck, one head writes one field of the video signal, and
the second head writes the other.
The drum spins at the frame rate of the television signal, so in the US it spins at 30 revolutions
per second, or 1800 RPM.
But remember, there are two fields per frame, which is why there are two head sweeps per rotation.
Each head has a slightly different azimuth to prevent crosstalk among adjacent tracks,
and the repeated switching back and forth creates a seamless video signal.
Cramming this entire mechanism into a camera would be pretty absurd.
The best thing to do would be to shrink the video head drum as much as possible.
Sony’s solution is truly ingenious.
It’s a little complicated to explain, so bear with me.
To shrink the drum in size, Sony designed a single video head that was really two heads
in one, each with a different azimuth.
This dual azimuth head would on its own be responsible for recording both the odd and
even video fields.
If you look at the normal Beta head drum, you can see two wires going down to each head.
But if you look at the head drum on this Betamovie, you’ll see that the single head has 4 wires
going down to it.
One pair drives the odd field azimuth and the second drives the even field azimuth.
Again, it’s really two heads in one place.
This single head then has to somehow record two fields consecutively.
To make this possible, this shrunken head drum spins at twice the normal speed.
Instead of head 1 making a 180 degree sweep for the odd field, followed by head 2 making
another 180 degree sweep for the even field, in Betamovie Head 1 makes a nearly 360 degree
sweep for the odd field, and then the same head makes a second 360 degree sweep for the
even field, this time acting as if it were head 2 by switching to the second azimuth.
By pulling double duty, the drum could be much smaller, and the tape transport could
be shrunken down to fit in this little box.
But I spy a problem.
You see, although the tape is wrapped most of the way around the drum, there is still
a gap.
The head can’t possibly make a seamless video signal because there’s a chunk of
each rotation where it’s not touching the tape!
Well, here’s where things get even more complicated.
Sony managed to in a kinda-sorta way time-compress the image from the camera so that it was recorded
faster than real time.
This may sound like a daunting task for an analog video system, but it’s actually a
little simpler than it seems.
There isn’t really any time compression going on, rather the image tube is being oversampled.
So imagine we want a normal 525 line signal to be put on the tape.
Each pass of the head across the tape needs to record 262.5 lines.
A normal VCR just spits this straight onto the tape because the two heads seamlessly
take over for each other at the end of each field.
But with a literal gap from the end of one sweep to the start of another, even though
we have this magic dual azimuth head, some of those 525 lines would be recorded onto air.
Thus they’d be missing.
Rather than panic about missing lines, Sony decided to just thrown in extra lines.
By sampling the image tube with, say, 625 lines per frame, then the gap in the tape
won’t matter.
Each time the head passes the gap, it tries to record 50 of the lines onto thin air.
But so long as those lines don’t contain any of the image, their absence on the tape
is of no consequence.
In the end, 525 lines get put on the tape in exactly the same fashion as a normal VCR.
[Banjoey country music which abruptly stops each time the head passes the gap]
This is often described as time compression because the camcorder is literally recording
at a higher clock speed than a normal VCR--about 18.8 kHz compared to 15.7 KHz.
See the actual distance the head travels along the tape with each sweep is the same as a
normal VCR.
It will line up perfectly with the head surface once it’s inside a full size Beta VCR.
But that gap means that the head is travelling a longer distance with each rotation.
Even though the head is rotating once per field, the head drum itself is a little bit
larger than half the normal size.
This means that the head itself travels the distance with a tape-to-head speed that’s
about 20% too fast.
It’s like taking this sound recording, speeding it up by 20% and then adding gaps of silence
to return it to its original length.
Each section of data was recorded a little too fast in real time, and it has to be slowed
down somehow to fill in the gaps.
For a Beta VCR to display an image from the Betamovie, there have to be 525 lines for
every two sweeps of the video head.
By simply sampling the picture tube at 625 lines, the gap from the Betamovie head will
routinely throw out 100 of them and you’ll be left with the 525 you need.
By tossing out roughly 20% of the lines with each head sweep, in effect the head’s higher
speed when recording becomes cancelled out.
And it’s not like parts of the image are being lost here--the image tube is simply
being overscanned, so the tossed out lines are pretty much just black.
Going back to our audio analogy, the Betamovie records onto the tape with a continuous stream,
but because there’s a gap of silence with each pass of the head, in effect it’s as
though only this is being recorded onto the tape, and in real-time the frequency of that
signal is about 20% faster than a normal cassette.
But because what lies in the gaps isn’t part of the signal we actually need, they
don’t matter for a VCR to read the tape.
What might be a little hard to explain is that the gap is only there when recording.
It’s simply a chunk of the data stream coming from the image sensor that doesn’t get recorded
on the tape.
But we don't want that data anyway, it just gets tossed out when the head is passing the gap.
So when the tape is played back on a normal VCR, there are no gaps at all.
And because the tape-to-head speed is a little bit slower in the VCR, that 18.8 kilohertz
signal recorded by the Betamovie will automatically be slowed down and become the 15.7 kilohertz
signal the TV needs.
The only reason this time compression needed to be done was because there’s a gap from
one head sweep to the next in the Betamovie.
Wow, that was kind of tough to explain.
But what’s not tough to explain is how incredibly unique this solution is.
This video trickery enabled the Betamovie to be remarkably small for its time, while
producing recordings that were compatible with your favorite Beta VCR.
But now is where things start to fall apart.
See, although this bit of engineering is clever and awesome, the user experience with this
machine is just kind of real bad.
To start, the single-head trickery means the Betamovie cannot play back its own recordings.
There’s no way for it to decompress the signals it records.
A normal Beta machine, where the heads travel a bit slower relative to the tape and there
is no gap between them, will produce the continuous 15.7 kilohertz signal your TV needs.
But the higher tape-to-head speed of the Betamovie could only reproduce chunks of its original
18.8 kilohertz signal, no good for getting a picture on screen.
The only way to get this mechanism to play back a tape for a TV would be to actually
design a time delay circuit that could slow down each head sweep by 20 percent and eliminate
the physical gap between the sweeps.
Doing so mechanically with another VCR is easy, but electronically in 1983?
Yikes.
Because the camcorder cannot play back its own recordings, it was designed without an
electronic viewfinder.
Most other camcorders of this time have a small black and white CRT that is basically
showing you exactly what the camera sees.
The upshot of this is that you can easily tell what’s in focus, you can see if its putting a timestamp
on there, and the camcorder can display error messages or battery life or any number of
things on that screen.
But for Betamovie?
This is all you get.
4 LEDs.
The C means “Caution” so any number of things.
W means you should probably check the white balance--that’s right there’s no automatic
white balance here!
Instead, you were supposed to use the translucent lens cap, point the camera at the light source,
and then hit the white balance button on the side.
Neat.
The T simply means that it’s recording.
You know, T for Record,
but it also means low battery, so it’s probably flashing for that?
But I don’t know.
And then L means that--there’s low light.
Maybe find some more light.
Or put on an accessory light.
I mean, it’s nice of it to warn me, but…
Now what is nice about the Betamovie viewfinder is that it’s in color.
Using a split prism similar to some SLR cameras, the image in the viewfinder is actually through-the-lens,
so you get a full bright, color image.
This also means you can check focus and composition.
The only trouble is that the focusing aid is really tough for me to use.
Perhaps I could get better with practice, but in this footage I shot, a lot of it wasn’t
exactly in great focus.
It’s just very hard to see what is and isn’t in focus through this viewfinder.
Oh, and of course focus is entirely manual.
This lens is aided by a very slow power zoom, but that’s the only automation you get.
You’re on your own for focusing.
Although this electronic viewfinder is black and white, I find it much easier to work with.
Particularly since it allows you to see the camera’s exposure level, and since it automatically
adjusts exposure, your eye in the eyecup doesn’t have to cope with rapid changes in image brightness,
which again I think makes it easier to use.
It also means that you know if the camera’s image is being washed out, whereas on the
Betamovie you’ll have no clue until you get home and can watch the tape.
The real trouble with Betamovie was that its crippled functionality made it barely better
than a wind-up 8mm film camera.
It’s basically just point and shoot with no chance of review.
There is no rewind or fast forward button-
it can only record so all you get is a record button.
This camera here, which was my grandfather’s, is used in practically the same way as the Betamovie.
Of course the Betamovie didn’t require film development and could record sound
- I’m not an idiot, I realize it’s far more convenient than 8mm film -
But you lost out on so much of what other cameras could do.
Oh, so now we need to talk about other cameras.
What might be the saddest thing about Betamovie and its ingenious head drum was that VHS was
able to do a similar miniaturization while still retaining full VHS functionality.
This camcorder was also my grandfather’s, and while it is a little bigger than the Betamovie,
it’s only marginally larger.
And it takes full-size VHS cassettes, which themselves are much larger than Beta.
If we take it apart, we find a similar shrunken head drum that also gets the tape wrapped
around it most of the way.
But rather than create a weird dual azimuth head and increase the tape-to-head speed,
VHS camcorders simply used more heads.
With this machine and others like it, the tape wraps around 270 degrees.
With 4 heads placed in quadrants, when one head finishes tracing the tape, rather than
the opposite head taking over for it as in a normal VCR, the adjacent head is in place
to start the next track.
The head drum has to spin faster than a normal VCR, but there is no gap at all between scans.
This required a bit more of an elaborate head-switching scheme, since it was less a your-turn my-turn
setup, and more of a hot-potato hot-potato hot potato, but it meant that no signal trickery
needed to be done.
And, most importantly, a VHS camcorder can play its own recordings.
Now, this is useful of course when you’re out and about filming your child’s lackluster
softball performance and you want to show little Jimmy how he screwed up right there
and so hopefully he won’t do it again!
But most importantly it allowed for dubbing your own tapes onto a second tape with another VCR.
This camcorder’s battery charger and power brick is also a dock of sorts.
The multi-pin connection actually sends composite and even RF video to the jacks in the base,
so you could easily plug the camcorder into your tabletop VCR.
Or even vice versa, if so desired.
Lots of families liked to create tapes to send to relatives and to brag about their
new camcorder, and this Magnavox machine makes that easy.
Simply plug it into your VCR’s A/V input, hit play on the camera,
and record on the VCR.
But with a Betamovie, you’ll need to get your hands on a second VCR if you want
to do that.
Its power brick does nothing but charge the battery, or power the camcorder.
So let’s review.
Sony made a really neat and honestly groundbreaking product with Betamovie.
Their single dual-azimuth head and time-compressed recording scheme was technologically intriguing,
but crippled the functionality of the device itself.
With little purpose to an electronic viewfinder, Sony stuck with cryptic LED indicators in
a somewhat difficult to use through-the-lens viewfinder.
So essentially, Sony once again put some wonderful engineering into a devastatingly flawed device.
With the Betamax format already struggling in 1983, the release of Betamovie wasn’t
super well timed.
Plus, the only people who could use a betamovie
were the same people who already had a Betamax VCR.
This camera is of literally no use if you don’t already have a Betamax machine.
And at $1500 it ain’t exactly cheap.
On the other hand, this Magnavox camera with its docking station
could function completely on its own.
You can even play prerecorded rental tapes through it, so for some people their new camcorders
played double duty as their first VCRs.
The only real downside with using the camera as a VCR is that it can’t record from TV,
at least not easily.
But then children, oh boy did JVC just go and one-up Sony real hard.
Just one year after Betamovie came out, JVC released the Videomovie.
Great name guys, super unique.
Anyway, the Videomovie introduced the VHS-C format.
Now, these tapes, if you’re unfamiliar, are miniature VHS cassettes that are recorded
in exactly the same fashion as a standard cassette.
JVC used a very clever design where the supply reel has a normal cog on the bottom, and the
take-up reel is turned by a small gear.
This could drastically shrink the tape transport of a portable VCR, and by simply popping it
into one of these adapters, the same cassette can be used with a full-sized VCR.
The adapter will move the tape out to the normal position, and it has gearing inside
to run the take-up gear wheel from this second cog below.
Pretty clever.
Now, when these were first released, only 20 minute tapes were available.
Recording with the SLP speed could push this to an hour with a sacrifice of quality, but
it was still significantly shorter than the 3 hours of a standard L-750 cassette with
the Betamovie.
But camcorders themselves could be very very small.
The first videomovie is somewhat famous as this is what Marty McFly uses to videotape
Doc in Back to the Future.
[This is truly amazing.
A portable television studio!]
But later camcorders like this one show how much the transport could shrink.
This is getting into palm-sized territory.
Yeah it’s still kinda chunky, but you can indeed hold this with one hand.
There’s no need to go over-the-shoulder.
Sony abandoned Betamovie relatively quickly.
With the demise of Betamax as a format, and with their insistence on using the record-only
single head setup, it had limited appeal from the start.
Only 5 consumer models were ever released.
Sony started concentrating on the Video 8 format, which was superior to VHS-C in that
the camcorders could be even smaller.
But where Video 8 was lacking was in direct compatibility with a standard VCR.
Being able to simply pop your little tapes into an adapter and watch them on TV was pretty
compelling for many people.
For many years it was a choice of a slightly bulkier camcorder with a more limited recording
time but true VHS compatibility,
or a smaller and longer-running camera with some playability caveats.
In the end, the Betamovie was a really clever and very well designed machine.
The fact that this is still working today is pretty remarkable.
But functionally, it’s just kind of a turd.
There are so many reasons not to buy this.
And I’ll tell you, I think the original owner of this was embarrassed to have bought it.
I almost passed this up at my Goodwill where I found it because he or she...
had slapped this bumper sticker on the case
where it should say “BETAMOVIE”.
I think they didn’t want to advertise that they were in the Beta ecosystem.
To close out this video, let’s look at some footage I recorded in the same park where
I first made my Beta and VHS comparison.
I gotta tell you wandering around in public with a big Betamovie on your shoulder is a
little embarrassing and thankfully only a few people stared.
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So, should I adopt the typical 1980’s - uh, or I guess home video voice?
“So here we are at the park.
And we’ve got some very, very pretty flowers.
Let’s get a closeup on those flowers.
Ooh, pretty.
I’ll have to maybe focus a bit. I think that looks good.
OK we’ll zoom back out now.
Let’s go down this way!”
[Sound of locomotive]
How well, does this (laughter)…
How well does this work as a selfie cam?!
I don’t know!
Here I am staring into the Betamovie, and I have no idea what this looks like
because you can’t tell!
The power zoom on this thing is really, really slow.
I mean, you can just twist this here.
It’s not limited to the power zoom.
But the power zoom is really, really slow.
Ooh, let’s try the macro lens.
It has a macro lens.
So it’s all the way--that’s reasonably macro.
I am pretty close to these.
Huh.
Look at that!
We’ve got some decent bokeh here on the Betamovie!
Ah!
Trouble is if you look up now…
Oh no you can, ok wait, am I in macro then?
[struggling with camera]
How did that work?
[struggling intensifies]
Huh, OK.
I don’t really get it.
‘Plane up there somewhere.
Ah, a plane!
Ooh, lens flare!
Lens flare!
It’s actually pretty decent!
I probably shouldn’t look at the sun too much, though…
Ah, well I think this is enough footage with the Betamovie for now.
OK now the moment of truth, did we push record on the camera?
Because I’m somewhat doubting that I did.
Oh, thank god.