Professional broadcasting has always been a natural for Sony. Their reel-to-reel video recorders were used primarily by institutions, studios and television stations. This gave Sony a nature inroad into the broadcast industry. When Sony introduced the U-matic cartridge recorder it made recording simpler and quicker. Recording sporting events, local news and even commercials became so much easier than using the bulky Quadruplex units or 16 mm film. So naturally when the Beta format was introduced with its smaller cassette size the professional recording industry quickly embraced it (PLATE 1).
The very things that Beta lovers enjoyed proved to be the deciding factor for its adoption by serious media experts. If you're going to do any determined video editing you couldn't put up with the constant tape threading in and out that VHS put one through. It was awkward, irritating and just impractical. So VHS never had a chance. Beta simply dominated the professional broadcast recording industry, just as U-matic had done before it. What you see above is the cover of the brochure for the first professional Betamax, the SLO-260. You think the first consumer Betas were expensive? The professional units were out of sight. It was nothing to spend $2000 to $3000 on the babies (in 1976). Why? Because the market was smaller and the technical standards were so high. For consumer units the electrical components might be rated to a tolerance of 20%, which is typical. But for the professional units that received constant use ratings of 10% or less was more common. This is because the performance needed to be so consistent and highly regulated. The composition of the other components used for the broadcast industry are also higher. More accurate color filtering, signal accuracy and line stability was engineered in. This required more electronics and extra circuitry. These justified the expense of the pro Beta units.
Click on the photo (PLATE 2) and here we see the first generation of professional Beta models. An SLO-340 portable for news gathering, a high end camera, the DXC-1610, and two studio units, the SLO-260 and SLP-100 player. These were  units since recording quality, rather than recording time, was the prime directive. Click on the photo again (PLATE 3) and you will see that Sony continued on to make a wide assortment of models to fill the needs of schools, studios, car dealerships, institutions, broadcasters and the government. I am not going to identify them individually but with the exception of the SLO-420 all these were made with a similar case design and had handles for mobility. Click again (PLATE 4) and here are two units made specifically for the demanding job of tape duplication. These were designed to duplicated movies for the public and for the rental business. These were  only recorders. It was common for these to be mounted in rack assemblies of fifty or more. Click again (PLATE 5) and we see two units, the GCS-50 recorder and the GCS-1 camcorder, these were designed primarily for editing, archiving and special ventures. A special editor, the RM-E50, interfaced with two GCS-50 VCRs so that up to 60 scenes could be programmed and assembled from a master source. Editors similar to this could be used with the units seen in the previous panel for similar situations. Click again (PLATE 6) and here are that last of the pro units, the Extended Definition Beta sports package. These were made for delivering a super high quality picture and required special metal formula tape. Overall far fewer pro Betas were made then consumer models. They covered a narrower range of specialties and remained in the marketplace for a longer period of time. Professional Beta wasn't without it's competitors though. Sony developed other recording formats that were also competing for those professional dollars, and they used the very same Beta cassette design. These were Betacam and BetacamSP and they were even more exacting and had picture resolution that matched or exceeded the 500 lines of needed for broadcast video. This format ran at a much higher tape speed and it used a different recording scheme. Betacam and BetacamSP would overtake the pro Betas for broadcast use and eventually become the world wide professional standard. Other formats that used the versatile cassette design soon followed. BetacamSX, Digital Betacam, MPEG IMX and HDCAM pushed the professional formats even further. Sony licensed these formats and a number of other manufacturers joined in to make machines and tape. The revolutionary Betamax lived on for many years in different forms, even if it didn't become the world standard for general consumption as Sony had hoped. But it did monopolize the market it was best in. The professional one where quality was king. To open a panel featuring the professional brochure click here. To open a SL-7200 brochure for a side-by-side comparison click here.
To got to the next panel "Understanding Betamax" click here.
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