An excellent pro Betamax is the GCS-50. It's not only built like a tank and has an all-metal, direct drive loading system (unlike the cheap plastic loading rings in the consumer gear), but it also records in Super High-Band Beta Is - normally, it only records in Super Beta II, but there's a hidden switch under the jog dial that is covered by a sticker - when removed you scan switch between Beta I and II speeds for recording. It plays every speed and mode of Beta tape. It also allows you to turn off the High Band circuits and Hi-Fi circuits which switches in the original Beta I filters that hadn't been employed in any Betamax since the original model was introduced - it makes original Beta I recordings play perfectly. The unit has linear stereo too with seperate audio dubbing to either channel - no consumer deck in America had linear stereo except for the ill fated Marantz. I believe the GSC-50 is listed on the Beta website as one of the dream machines. You can find them for as low as $50 sometimes on eBay - that's what I got mine for. The best tape for making recordings is the oxide Betacam format tapes - they make incredible Super High-Band Beta Is recordings. Oh, the Hi-Fi sound is excellent too and doesn't seem to be afflicted with the high frequency splatter that the consumer units can have - it makes prerecorded Super Beta Hi-Fi tapes like Grease sound fantastic (I sync the Beta Hi-Fi sound of Grease to the widescreen DVD since the new mix is so awful).

Wow cool find I like the remote on the end of the page its like a STAR TREK tricorder that SuperBeta deck is cool.

Yeah, when all is said in done i will drop some cash on one. Though I found the tracking on my beta and omg the picture is pretty amazing.

The SL-20 is a damn fine player - since its heads are optimized for Beta III recording, it doesn't make a great recorder at the Beta II speed, but for playback, it's picture can't be beat. Many of the pro models, like the GCS-50, don't have as sharp a picture as the SL-20 because they don't use edge enhancement and extra noise reduction like the consumer units since editing is usually done. So, although they are not as sharp, they play the tapes with less noise and a more 'stable' picture overall. The Framing Servo on the GCS-50 is nice to have if you edit any recordings together because it makes sure the phase of the color subcarrier is properly aligned at the edit point and you won't get any visual glitches - it has flying erase heads too.

The fun stuff to collect on Beta is the very earliest prerecorded films from Magnetic Video, Time Life, Fotomat and Warner - also the "Rental Only" tapes from the short lived experiment in the early 80's. Warner, Fox and MGM all tried Rental Only for about 6 months in 1981/82. Allied Artists had its own label in the late 70's, and Nostalgia Merchant is also fun to collect.

I remember when my family got our first VCR, a Panasonic VHS top loader, back in 1984. The closest rental place was a mom and pop in the next town over, but it was neat as it had a VHS and Beta section. Surprisingly, the Beta section was about 3/4 the size of the VHS section. So there were quite a few titles available back then.

Some video companies released Beta and VHS titles in the same Big Boxes (like Wizard Video and Monterey Home Video.)

I sometimes entertain the idea of starting to collect Beta movies (I do have an old Sanyo mono Betamax sitting in my mom's attic), but then worry about allocating any funds that I could be using to buy more LDs!

Everything released on VHS was also released on Beta up until around 1986 or so - that's when you started to see low cost prerecorded titles released on VHS, and duplicated in the 6 hour SLP mode, that had no Beta release - at first it was only from smaller companies like Goodtimes and then later Paramount and others had low cost labels that were VHS only. By 1990, prerecorded Beta was done on a special order basis only with Sony running their own fulfillment company to keep Beta fans apprised of new releases and to order tapes and harder to find blank tape lengths. After Super Beta was released prerecorded tapes were duplicated in the so-called Quasi-Super Beta that had about 260 lines of resolution and also kept the white clip expansion and other improvements of Super Beta but not the full high band carrier shift so that they would stay watchable on standard Beta decks (unlike Super VHS which isn't watchable on standard VHS decks) - the quasi Super tapes look wonderful, for tape - visibly superior to VHS and even better than Super VHS, due to the much lower video noise level of Super Beta (Super VHS had too much noise for its resolution level). Plus Beta Hi-Fi's sound isn't as affected by head switching noise as VHS Hi-Fi's.

One drawback to collecting prerecorded Beta is that tapes tend to be in worse condition than VHS due to Beta's U-Loading system. When it was working right, it was much gentler on the tape, but if something went wrong, it would destroy large parts - since most all Beta decks kept the tape threaded at all times, if the user didn't keep their Beta unit clean inside bits of dirt could get between the tape and guide poles causing scratches that ran the length of the tape.

The single size box for both Beta and VHS was started by Fox to cut costs and later copied by others. I always hated it, especially for prerecorded stereo tapes before the advent of Hi-Fi because the Beta version will either say Stereo or have a cheap sticker that says Monarual. Some Hi-Fi Fox tapes didn't even cover up the "Dolby Noise Reduction on Linear Tracks" blurb on the Beta version. Columbia Pictures first prerecorded tapes came out in 1979 and were the first to be released in the plastic clamshell case, which Disney and many of the less-known labels, such as Wizard, adopted. Disney's clamshell cases for their Gold series of cartoons are especially nice. The Fox boxes that slide out like a drawer often came with a full color catalog inside, which is nice for the obsessive collector, as many of us are.