David Looser wrote:
"John Williamson" wrote in message
...
I was thinking that Beta only ever had a small part of the market, even
though it was produced for a long time,

I agree.

MiniDv & VHS-C have mostly seen
off Digital 8 & the other 8mm tape formats,

I'm not sure that I agree with that analysis. VHS-C was launched
head-to-head with the original 8mm tape format. The supposed advantage of
VHS-C was that the tapes could be played back (with the aid of an adaptor)
on an ordinary VHS VCR. On the other hand 8mm offered better picture and
sound quality and longer recording time per tape. So VHS-C appealed more to
the casual user and 8mm to the enthusiast. Later we had both S-VHS-C and
Hi8. Again Hi8 was the choice of the enthusiast, indeed it was good enough
to be used professionally and there were Hi8 camcorders and editing decks
made for the professional market.

Possibly I should have mentioned the consumer market, I just took that
as read. Hi8 was about the same picture quality as low band U-Matic, I
think, S-VHS a tad lower?

When Digital 8 was launched Sony clearly decided *not* to offer it as a pro
or semi-pro option, all the D8 camcorders were clearly aimed strictly at the
amateur market, the selling point being the ability of D8 camcorders to play
back analogue 8mm and Hi8 tapes. On the other hand there were semi-pro
MiniDV camcorders available. IMO this is a pity as I've found D8 to be a far
more robust format than MiniDV, as good as DVCAM, let down only by the lack
of D8 camcorders with the performance and features expected in the semi-pro
market.

I've seen a *lot* of Sony gear in Professional & semi-professional hands
over the years, but not a lot in amateur hands. I've no great experience
of the reliability of the Sony D8 stuff, but a lot of the problems I've
read about with MiniDV relate to using more than one brand of tape in
the machine.
Sony also had their pro market to protect, so I'd not expect them to
push the D8 stuff as professional quality. ;-)


If you want an example of a failed format that almost brought a huge
electronics company to it's knees I'd like to nominate RCA's Selectavision
video-disc system.

Quite...

--
Tciao for Now!

John.