GCS-50, SL-HF900 & SL-HF1000 COMPARISON
Here they are, three of the greatest video recorders ever offered. You can't help but love these machines because they are so user friendly and have great features. Is the GCS-50 an SL-HF900 in disguise? Or is it more like the SL-HF1000? Well lets just take a look at these beauties and you can be the judge. If you examine the above photo you can readily see that the SL-HF1000 is a larger machine than the other two. Sony could have probably made it the same physical size as the SL-HF900, but it wouldn't have made as strong of an impression and the front panel components may of been too close together (in retrospect). So by size alone we can't rule out its relationship to the GCS-50. Now examine the SL-HF900. It is the right size to imply a relationship to the GCS-50, but that's not all. Look at the picture in the lower right. Here is an illustration of the GCS-50 that appeared in a national video publication prior to its formal release, it bears a striking resemblance to the SL-HF900. So at the very least, based on size and front panel layout, the prototype GCS-50 was more closely related to the SL-HF900 than the SL-HF1000. Now let's dig a little deeper and go inside these units. Click on the picture and here we have ghost images of all three. These illustrations appear in the service manuals and are used to identify the locations of the various circuit boards, I added color graphics. Similar colored boards indicate a commonality between the boards as to identity, function and layout. Many of the components in Betas are the same, just as tires will fit more than one style vehicle so will many parts interchange across Beta models lines. This keeps cost down and reduces inventory. Is the similarity enough that a one could say that the design engineers borrowed more than just the basics? Or did they lift entire sections or whole boards from one model to the other, enough to say the machine are more than closely related? Click on the picture and more boards are shown. Now click again and things really start to get difficult. These are the system control boards of all three and they, as you might expect are almost identical. These will almost interchange between each other, but the machines still operate very differently. How is this done? Master processor programming. The system control integrated circuit seen as a square in the lower third of each board towards the center is unique to the individual unit. There are other ICs that are different in each unit, but it is the main CPU that controls the personality of each model. (Incidentally, the IC can't physically be seen in the photos above because these graphical prints from the manuals and no actual parts are shown.) So there you have it. Similar but different. Very similar because they all play the Beta format, different because they offered different features and functions. Collect all three.
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