Despite All Odds, Sony’s Beta Format Still Lives : Video: It made up fewer than 1% of 13 million VCRs sold last year. In 28,000 U.S. stores, only 4.4% carry prerecorded Beta tapes. And yet, Sony keeps producing the cassettes.

Like an old soldier who has been lost in the wilderness, unaware that the war has ended and his side has lost, Sony Corp. continues to produce Betamax videocassette recorders for home use.

You read right:

Beta lives, if barely.

Sony, which launched the home videotaping revolution when it introduced the machines 20 years ago this month, still makes Betamax VCRs, which have all but disappeared during the last decade as VHS recorders have wiped them out of the market.

Although Sony declined to release sales figures, it is believed that Betamax accounted for fewer than 1% of the 13 million VCRs sold in the United States last year.

And only 4.4% of the more than 28,000 video stores in the United States carry prerecorded Beta tapes for sale or rent, according to a study released this year by Video Store magazine. Even fewer stores carry blank Beta tapes.

All major studios have stopped releasing videos on Beta and, of the Southland’s four leading home-video retailers, only Adray’s continues to stock Betamax recorders and blank tapes.

But Jim Bonan, vice president of Sony’s home video division, balked at the lost-warrior analogy. “If that was the case,” he said, laughing, “we never would have started making VHS.”

So why does Sony--which is now the leading producer of stereo VHS equipment--continue to produce Betamax recorders?

“I really personally don’t have a clue,” said Bishop Cheen, a senior analyst for Paul Kagan Associates, a media consulting firm based in Carmel. “What the world is not pining for is one more video format, let alone one that already went over the cliff.”

Mostly, Sony’s Bonan said, the company still churns out Beta recorders because it is proud of the product--which is generally considered to be superior in quality to VHS--and indebted to those who continue to believe in it.

“We put a lot of effort and time and energy into establishing Beta and inventing the [home videotaping] category,” Bonan said. “That’s not something that we want to walk away from, so we’ve continued over the years to provide tape and to provide machines.

“We sold a lot of Beta machines. And a lot of the consumers who bought them--still have [Beta] tape libraries. And VCRs being mechanical devices--they do wear out. So we want to keep providing consumers an opportunity to replace their old Betamax with a new one.”

One such consumer is Roger Martinson, 62, of Sylmar, who bought a Betamax only last year, to replace an older model.

“We started out with Beta and we have a lot of Beta tapes,” said Martinson, who also owns a VHS recorder. “We just wanted something to continue playing them on.

“It’s very frustrating. Eventually, I know that we will have to dump everything. The tapes themselves aren’t going to last forever. That’s why we bought the VHS, so we could buy the current movies.”

Still, Martinson remains partial to his Betamax.

“I like the quality, and the smaller tapes,” he said. “When we first got it, it was just incredible. I’ve never seen such a beautiful picture. And the sound--it was just wonderful.”

Quality, in fact, was not the reason for Betamax’s demise.

“History will always show that it was an oddity,” analyst Cheen said of Betamax’s failure in the VCR war. “Beta was a better format, was technically better and had a better start . . . but it lost.”

The original Betamax, which was part of a 298-pound console that included a 17-inch color television and carried a suggested retail price of $2,295, was introduced in Japan in May, 1975. It became available in the United States six months later.

Two years later, Matsushita began selling a cheaper recorder that worked on a rival technology, known as VHS, which used slightly larger tapes and made recordings for up to six hours, twice as long as the Beta tapes.

Matsushita then outmaneuvered Sony by adding extra features to its recorders and providing licenses to virtually any manufacturer or retailer that wished to slap a brand name on them--from Sears to General Electric to RCA.

Sony later improved the Betamax so that it played longer tapes and included more features, but by then VHS had established a stronghold.

VHS machines started to outsell Betamax, which led to more films being available on VHS, which led to more VHS recorders selling.

Betamax, which accounted for 62% of the VCR market in 1977, had only about 25% in 1983. These days, its share of the market is almost nonexistent, and about two-thirds of the Betamax machines produced by Sony are sold outside the United States, mostly in Japan.

In the Southland, even with none of its major competitors stocking them, Adray’s sells fewer than 350 Betamax recorders a year at its 10 outlets, video buyer Peter Parker said.

“It’s nothing great,” he said. “But we’re trying to corner a bigger piece of a diminishing market, so we’re still riding it for a while.”

So is Sony, whose spokesman expressed no lingering bitterness about losing the VCR war.

“It’s not really a sore spot anymore,” said Bonan, whose company introduced its first VHS machines in 1988. “We kind of look at it as, [Betamax] invented the category of VCR. It essentially created the entire home movie business, the video rental business.

“That heritage is something we’re very proud of. And we are currently very successful with VHS, so it’s not like we don’t have a business that was based on [Betamax]. It’s not Beta, per se, but it’s very much based on that.”

So will Sony discontinue Beta production at some point?

“Not immediately,” Bonan said. “It’s a small-volume thing, but we feel some continuing responsibility to keep manufacturing them. So, as long as we can do that, and people keep buying them, we’ll keep making them.”