carey@seismo.UUCP (Marie Carey) (02/21/84)
My husband and I just purchased a Sony Beta and we are concerned about what tapes to use. How do we know a "thick" tape from a "thin" tape? I have heard quite alot of bad news about the thin tapes so we would like to purchase only the thick tapes for our machine. Can anyone suggest the best Beta tapes on the market and how one can tell the difference between a thin and thick tape? Also price does not matter in the least. I may be mistaken also, but it seems that the VHS tapes are somewhat of a better quality. The Maxell tape is supposed to be really good, but we are not able to find that tape in a Beta format, only a VHS format. Of course, we only tried two video stores. We would appreciate any information anyone could give us. Thank you very much. M. Carey
lute@abnjh.UUCP (J. Collymore) (02/22/84)
I think that the method of determining the thickness of Video tapes is the same as audio tapes. I picked this up when I was studying electroniic music (in a 4-track studio) during my undergrad years. There are three thickness of tape (audio): 1.5 mil, 1.0 mil and 0.5 mil. Your standard 60-90 minute cassettes are 1.0 mil. Your 1200 ft. 2-8 track studio reels are 1.5 mil. Your 120-min cassettes are .5 mil. On your longer tapes, a thinner type must be used to allow the greater playing time to fit in the cassette housing. The problem is that 0.5mil tapes are very susceptible to stretching, caused by the tension on it when running it (i.e. play, rewind, ff, etc.). This is why many people had the problem of getting their 120-min. tapes jammed in their cassettes players. This caused many tape manufacturers to discontinue their 120-min. cassttes. Now, I'm not sure what the standard thickness of video cassette tapes is in mils, but I would ASSUME that the principle for video cassettes is the same as that for audio cassettes. To be certain, ask your dealer. Now this doesn't mean that your longer length video tapes will have a problem (e.g. VHS 8-hour tapes). I understand that the transport mechanism is significantly different than that in audio machines, and won't stretch your tapes, but you may want to ask around at various video shops to see what dealers and repairmen have to say. You might also want to ask other VCR owners if they have tried these longer (thinner?) tapes and see if they have noticed any problems. Problems with tape stretching, I guess would be flutter, or "wa-wa" in the audio track, and variation in image motion on the video. If anyone has any other remarks to add to mine, please post them to the net. Jim Collymore