After years of collecting, I have far too many items relating to my hobby.

This week I threw out around one hundred Beta Cam, tapes with Broadcast quality recordings on them. They covered all variations of beta news gathering formats. and tape formulations.

Sadly I can't store everything and these tapes succumb to the poor storage position I had them in.
Sad to think what material was lost as these tapes came my way after the TV studios abandoned tape formats and went to fully digital news gathering.

I still have around another one hundred tapes, stored in a better location.

If I ever get the time, I will fire up my PVW-2650P Sony Betacam SP machine, and have a look at how good, high-end tape formats got.

Pity that D-VHS was not released here in Australia. One can buy 2nd hand machines from Europe, but I'm not THAT rich to afford one.

I once had several hundred of those tapes though I used them in a standard Betamax recorder rather than the less versatile Betacam machines. By "less versatile" I merely refer to the fact that a 3 hour Betamax tape will only play for 30 minutes in a Betacam machine due to the extra bandwidth the broadcast-standard format requires. I had a mate who worked at one of the TV networks and he used to throw tapes my way as Betamax tapes were starting to become hard to find by that stage.