Betamax to Blu-ray: Sony format winners, losers
Sony got it right with the CD.
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)Betamax was one of Sony's biggest blunders.
The videocassette format was introduced in 1975, and initially sold well. But when JVC's VHS tape cartridge was introduced in 1978, Betamax quickly lost its lead. The media loved Beta for its superior picture quality, but Standard Betamax tapes were only 60 minutes, and VHS 3-hour tapes could record more TV shows.
VHS was more popular, but Betamax refused to die. Production in the U.S. ended in 1993, and the last Betamax machine in the world was produced in Japan in 2002.
Ah, but the Compact Disc was a hit from the get-go. On August 31, 1982, an announcement was made in Tokyo that four companies, Sony, CBS/Sony, Philips, and Polygram had jointly developed the world's first CD system. Talk of the CD's demise are premature, sales are still in the hundreds of millions of discs a year.
The MiniDisc was introduced January 12, 1992. The recordable music format was originally based exclusively on ATRAC audio data compression, but the format never caught on in the U.S. MiniDiscs were popular in Japan and Asia as a digital upgrade from cassette tapes.
Which reminds me, Sony's ill-fated Elcaset came out in 1976. Like Betamax, Sony was trying to make a higher quality tape format, in this case better than the Philips Compact Cassette. Elcaset was better, but it was too large and cumbersome. Elcaset was a flop.
Speaking of which, Sony-Philips teamed up again to create the Super-Audio CD, which premiered in 1999. Indeed, the supersounding discs bested CD and offered backward compatibility with CD and DVD players--and 5.1 channel surround sound. SACD was praised by audiophiles, but fizzled in the market. Sony Records no longer releases new SACD titles, but the format continues to have the support of audiophile labels.
Which brings us to Blu-ray. Sony's Blu-ray is on the winning side of a format war having outlasted HD-DVD, but I wouldn't bet on Blu-ray's long-term prospects.
This list of Sony's hits and misses is hardly complete, please tell us about your favorite Sony formats in the comments.
Steve Guttenberg is a frequent contributor to magazines and Web sites including Home Entertainment, Playback, and Ultimate AV. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
Great article!! I believe that MiniDiscs didn't catch on in America because there weren't (at least not any cheap) minidisc recorders. Had Sony released those shortly after the release of minidisc players, then I think it might have caught on. CD burners were getting more & more popular, so why get a format that I can't burn my favorite songs too. Oh well.
5 1/4 floppys, 8" floppys, several tape formats, etc, etc. At one time there was even Paper Tape. WOW!!
Failed and obsolete data storage formats are nothing new.
I was an early adopter of LaserDiscs, remember those 12" shiny discs...?
Still have my LaserDisc player hooked up to my system and on occaision will pull out an old LD to play,
it also makes an excellent CD player!!
I've held off on the Blu-Ray player purchase... I don't buy many DVD's, but rent heavily. I've been a Netflix member since their ealry inception. I learned my lesson with the LaserDisc purchases and found that most movies are not worth watching more than once anyway. It would be nice to have that crystal ball to see where Blu-Ray is at in 2, 3. or 5 years.
But then again it's probably safe to say that Blu-Ray, DVD's, CD's etc. will eventually be replaced by somehting else..... it's just a matter of when and whether it something to really worry about.....
What I think turned a lot of people off from MD wasn't necessarily the price of the players (although they weren't cheap) but the impression that the sound quality was bad. Many journalists reported the first MDs did have poor sound quality, but by the time I started waving the MD flag the quality was better than MP3 and indistinguishable from CD (to my less than audiophile hearing, anyway).
It was actually the iPod (not a CD burner) that convinced me to give up the MD format. Why would I could carry 500 discs when I could carry the same content in something the size of an MD player?
Laserdiscs were very cool. Here in Denver, LaserLand was THE PLACE to buy (or rent) LDs. The quality was far superior to VHS and most LDs presented the video in "letterbox" (when most VHS tapes didn't). However, inexpensive players (like the Pioneer I owned) only let you do do certain "tricks" (like frame-by-frame advance) on expensive CAV discs. My player couldn't freeze frame on a CLV disc.
While I still have my entire LD collection, comparing DVDs to LDs today, DVD wins.
I guess, therefore, I can't really speak for the standalone players. All of my players have been multipurpose.
Sony would be smart if they were to license Blu-Ray music CD's. You could have one disc with audophile qulity tracks, along with high quality MP3 files, along with videos, lyrics and other stuff (ringtones, wallpaper, etc.). If you can produce those and sell them for $10-$12 a piece, many people would buy those.
If you remember, Beta was the better quality machine at first. But, what people never seemed to understand was that it was only better in the original speed... one hour. With VHS the standard speed was two hour, but that could have a movie on it, and the movie studios jumped on it.
So, Beta increased their capacity to 3 hour, but anything Beta could do, so could VHS. They jumped to 4 hour, and now quality was no different. By the time the Beta 5 and VHS 6 came out, the writing was on the wall. Then, in a stunning move, Beta began making machines that wouldn't record in one hour! I couldn't believe it. That was their claim to quality.
So, anyway. You can see where this is going. Computers and entertainment needs more and more capacity all the time. When ever the HD-DVD boosters said "why do you need more capacity?", I could hear the IBM PC creators saying "Why would anyone ever need more than 640K of RAM?".
That, along with the increased bandwidth and the cool name made it clear to me, and I love it. Downloads currently are not of the same quality, and they still take up alot of time and storage. When you can buy a movie, and be sure you won't lose it because of a computer or appliance crash, then maybe it will make the big time. Until then, Blu-ray baby!
Do some research. I am recording the latest episodes of the Simpsons through my cable box's FireWire connection which is required by the FCC to be active. I'm taking the original 720p HD source and re-encoding it into H.264. A 2.5 GB file becomes 750 MB with very little loss of quality. The copy is slightly worse in a few spots. This shows how much smaller a H.264 files can be. Obviously, HD movies are much higher bitrates as they should be. I'm pointing out how much the file shrinks with a different codec. If I took the days to re-encode with my hardware into VC-1, it would be even smaller than that. With movies, capacity was NEVER an issue.
Blu-Ray won because they had more support. Pure and simple. The only electronics company on HD DVD's side was Toshiba and neutral LG. Blu-Ray had Sony and Pioneer and, well pretty much everyone else. Blu-Ray had more money and more influence and more support. Does anyone honestly think ignorant Joe Consumer is saying "Gee, Blu-Ray discs have more capacity than HD DVD, therefore, I'm buying Blu-Ray". Please. Never once did the commercials say "Blu-Ray, because our disc capacity is larger".
And who exactly is going to benefit from 4K in a home market other than the uber-rich who can afford to have a dedicated home theater room with some absurd 100" screen? (and even then I'm not even sure that would be enough to get the full benefit of 4K unless you sat 4 or 5 feet from it)
It already takes a 46 inch screen or bigger for most people to get real benefit from 1080p over 720p. It's hard enough to find space for 50 and 60 inch screens. How big will the 4K screen need to be to get any benefit from the increased resolution and will anyone want something that large in their living room?
I'm curious as to why people keep hating Sony for inventing new formats. (God knows Panasonic has tried, with even less success. DVD-RAM, anyone? How about Philips and the DCC? Toshiba and HD-DVD.) On the faceplate of my PC is a card reader for, counting, 15 formats (some from same family). So, it's okay if XYZ develops a format, but not Sony? Who wrote the law saying the first format to debut wins and no one else gets to try something different? The hatred must be because, even with the failures, Sony has been more successful than most in getting industries to adopt its formats.
But Sony still thinks they can use their once impressive market muscle to force people to use "formats" that only they use. That's not a format as much as a blatant money grab and consumers sense it.
UMD? Memory Stick? ATRAC? These aren't formats as much as they are a way to lock you into Sony's ecosystem and force you to give them more money.
Without support across the entire CE industry you don;t really have a "format".
- by minimalist March 27, 2009 6:27 AM PDT
- Lets not forget Sony's wonderful proprietary, and bad sounding, audio format they tried to make everyone use instead of mp3 with their early digital music players... ATRAC (otherwise know as ACRAP by some Sony employees who understood it was a bad idea from the beginning)
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- by paulimusmaximus April 2, 2009 5:07 PM PDT
- I don't see why people bother buying a bd player anyway unless you have a ps3. I have a philips dvd with upconvert, and the quality is pretty good. I can deal with pretty good quality for $60 rather than great quality for $300. I don't think blu ray is as big as a jump in technology over the dvd as the dvd was over vhs to justify the price. I'm sure I'll own a bd player in the future, but not yet.
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(20 Comments)Just judging from the retail presence though I don't think SACD and Blu-ray are very much alike. At best I recall tiny SACD sections at retail stores containing a couple of dozen titles.
If Blu-ray is as big of a flop as SACD then you'd never know it from the 25-30 foot long section of BD's already available at Best Buy or other retail stores. I think there are a little over a thousand BD's now. The format may not ever be as big as DVD but I'd say it already has significantly more traction that SACD or Minidisc ever dreamed of having in the US.