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What annoys me the most is all the conjecture. I'm not the sharpest tool in the box but the one thing I have is experience and just because Wikipedia says one thing or the salesman says another doesn't make it fact and I really grow tired of always being "corrected" by the inexperienced who always has to be "right" because they read something on the internet. Truth is many here including myself have U-Matic experience that goes back before the internet and know what's really "UP"
The fact of the matter is the U-Matic format spawned the Betamax format which beat VHS to the top of the television set two years before VHS did. All were consumer oriented formats aimed at low cost (relatively) while the U-Matic format was a "home" format developed in the 1960's and according to the inventor themselves was launched in 1968 however it didn't do well in the consumer world due to the pricetag the professionals made the best of it during the time when 16MM film and big sideburns dominated the ENG world... along with the little B&W SONY Rover, not everything in the late 60's was color.
The above conclusions in the last follow up quote-fest were once again made in the moment, when I said first generation I was referring to an original tape that wasn't copied several generations down not the generation of the VTR itself but because someone is so bent on being right this was overlooked in haste. The chroma smear is a shortcoming of the NTSC format itself and gets magnified during the subcarrier conversion process. U-Matic was better at the conversion process than the consumer formats and I believe it was the Sony VO-2800 series that had the 1H comb filter instead of the lumped L/C filters to separate the color from the luma. My VO-2860A editor has the comb filter with a much improved separation over the previous generations and a real resolution pattern check confirms this. The 2860 A-suffix was the last word in the top-load U-Matic arena, it was the first to use a real 3-phase servo motor to drive the head drum ditching the wide belt, it also uses a servo for the capstan leaving the AC motor to drive the reel table and a cooling blower, this deck is also the first to tip the scales at a verified 105 lbs crushing any consumer digital format that gets in its way.
Regardless of the format be it analog or digital there are always compromises and shortcomings, there are no perfect inventions only perfect intentions. Analog has some signal/noise issues while digital is limited by the bit depth and in the case of a DVD for example that is 8-bits/color giving only 256 shades and the artifact here is the dithering especially in the dark/black areas. In theroy analog has no shade steps being infinite however in practice I seem to recall having to keep things within a few f-stops. Chroma smear is another and in the digital realm there's the compression artifacts of the codec which I believe is MPEG-2 and the color sub-sampling be it 4-2-2 or in the case of the DV/DVCPRO/DVCAM is 4-1-1 in the NTSC world. Horizontal resolution is one of those "sticky" points in that often times a 250 line image can "look" better than something 600 lines by virtue of the edginess or grain and the same is true with the digital world, just because its a 1080P image doesn't mean it's "better" but this again is subjective being scan lines vs detail/frequency response and what the eye perceives. An analog videotape can not record something that is above it's highest carrier frequency, digital is limited to nyquist-shannon sampling theorem and sources like DVD for example don't often exceed 8Mb/s of real video data rates, they just make it look good on that 1920x1080P LCD and in the real world a first generation analog BetacamSP playback in Y/R-Y/B-Y feeding the same monitor is often times going to "look" better to the eye technical gibberish not withstanding but if you insist digital betacam has a video data rate over 10x that of a DVD plus the four 48K/20bit audio channels not to mention the video itself is 10 bits while Blue Ray I believe was something around 36Mb/s for 1080P playback and that was again 8-bit color.
So who wins here? No one. While U-Matic had a number of refinements it was limited to the state of the art of the day. The numbers may be very similar to those of VHS and Betamax however putting the technical gibberish aside U-Matic was "cleaner" in the sense it wasn't riddled with the consumer compromises and it had the advantage of being far more mechanically stable TBC not withstanding. Larger tape with more active recording surface area, higher tip writing speed meaning more magnetic particles are actively used. These would be like having a higher sampling rate in the digital world with less bleed over and better S/N due to the higher generated output from the head during playback requiring less head amp gain and better linearity.
In today's world U-Matic and all of the analog formats have been forced into obsolescence by the advancements in the digital technology, the same happened during the 1960's and 1970's with film when analog was all that we had. Myself I've been around since before the Beatles broke up and started my video career in the early 1980s lugging around a Sony VO-3800 that was tethered to an RCA TK-76B and powered with a 10AH motorcycle battery... I was 12 years old and collectively that entire outfit weighed more than I did. This what we had and we made the best of it. Now with a head full of gray hairs I still use the format knowing what it's capable of not the limitations or shortcomings. I also have digital in the form of digital betacam/HDCAM, blueray and DVD all feeding a last generation Samsung 54" plasma along with a betamax and type-C (BVH-2000) analog formats. Comparing the apples to apples the U-Matic "looks" better than the betamax which looks better than the VHS... there's a reason I don't do video-8 or Hi8. If you want to do another quotefest be my guest but all those corrections with the numbers taken from the sales brochures will never mean nothing when it comes to real experience.
As for my uploaded videos; I will do them in whatever format I want be it 30f/s 60f/s but being at the mercy of YouTube they're going to be compromised anyway. You want to see them in real life bring your own popcorn and be nice to my cats.
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