| While VHS was flooding the world market with bargain-basement, boring VCRs* Beta continued to scratch out a living doing what it did best. Delivering a superior picture and better performance. How the market was developing was featured in a 1985 Video magazine article devoted exclusively to recorders under $200.00. It listed over forty manufacturers from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and other countries. If you made electric razors, car parts, bicycles, mechanical toys or widgets you could gear up and become a VHS maker. Licensing was so lax that anyone with a tool and die shop could jump in, which they did. There were only three Betas in that list of inexpensive VCRs. Clearly selling on the cheap was not this formats strong point. Actually it really wasn't the point anymore. The recording time war was lost to VHS. Beta became all about innovation, quality features and the smooth operation of the tape transport. It was the champion of the better picture with better sound. Beta was the whole package, but it just didn't seem to get them off the shelf fast enough to make retailers happy. Why surrender store space to a dying format when you could sell mom and pop something just to watch rental movies and record soap operas. And so it went. Within these BETA FUN FACT dialogs are found some of the choice nuggets of the history that made Beta the preferred format to the loyal number of Betaphiles, that saw it as the only way to fly. *To be fair VHS also had some exciting high-end models, but they didn't have the impact on the high end pro-sumer market that Beta did. |