Betacam

Betacam is a family of professional half-inch tape video formats and videocassette products, developed by Sony from 1982. In colloquial use, Betacam singly is often used to refer to a Betacam camcorder, a Betacam tape, a Betacam video recorder or the format itself. Both analog, and later, digital, variants of the Betacam format have existed. The original Betacam format, which used the same cassettes as Betamax, supplanted the three-quarter-inch U-Matic format, which Sony had co-introduced in 1971. In addition to improvements in video quality by using split component video, the Betacam configuration of an integrated professional video camera and recorder led to its rapid adoption by electronic news gathering (ENG) organizations. In the late 1980s, an upgraded version called Betacam SP was introduced and gradually replaced film formats for single camera documentary shooting. Digital Betacam (often referred to as DigiBeta) was released in 1993 and went on to become the single most successful professional broadcast television tape format. In 1997 the HDCAM, and later its upgraded version HDCAM SR, was introduced recording in high-definition (HD) resolution using the Betacam shape videocassettes. By the late 2000s and the 2010s, Betacam use and products started being phased out in television studio environments by new tapeless products, typically those using flash memory.