We Picked the Wrong Side but Dad Didn't Care

We had Betamax when everyone else had VHS. My dad was firm about this and said Betamax was better quality, better picture, more reliable mechanism, blah blah, he was a big tech nerd. But He was right about all of it actually. Didn't matter in the end.

For about two years we basically couldn't rent films. The video shop around the corner, I think it was called Premier Video, something like that had one small shelf of Betamax tapes, wedged in somewhere between the horror section and the westerns. We watched all of them. Some of them twice. My dad wrote to Sony at one point asking when the selection would improve. I was maybe nine and I never found out if they wrote back. I read somewhere it was some big battle between Panasonic and their VHS and Sony and Betamax.

Eventually we got a second machine, a VHS, for the living room. The Betamax stayed in the bedroom. Dad refused to get rid of it. Said it could record things we couldn't get on VHS. He said this for years. It wasn't really true, or if it was I never saw any evidence. Who knows?

The picture quality was genuinely better though. Crisper. Less noise in the dark parts of the picture. In some parallel universe where Sony licensed the format properly we all grew up with sharper home video. Instead we got VHS and then DVD and then everything else, and Betamax just became a word people use when they mean losing. 😂