SilverWook said:

It was one where a wealthy (or at least well off) character had a deck in his home to tape football games without the express written permission of the NFL. Columbo should have arrested him for that alone. 😉

Yeah, I saw that one not too long ago. The mistake he made was resetting the guy’s watch to the correct time, not knowing that he always set his watch 5 minutes ahead. I didn’t notice his VCR was U-matic.

Based on my high school and college experiences U-matic was better than VHS but below the quality of Super VHS (400 lines) which I used extensively well into the 1990’s. Extended Definition Betamax at 500 lines might have made a splash had Sony marketed it more aggressively.

Yeah, I would expect S-VHS to exceed U-matic, though it was light on chroma resolution (30 lines), so it wasn’t considered broadcast quality (it wasn’t marketed to professionals anyway), despite its high luma resolution. ED-Beta was a “prosumer” deal, with 100 lines of chroma resolution. It was roughly equivalent to DVD. VHS was far too ensconced by that time for any other videotape format to make a dent in the consumer market though.

Not sure exactly what the BBC used in house at the time. That Dr. Who site frequently refers to the original episode masters from the 70’s being Quad. (Long since dubbed off to digital formats.) Shooting video on location away from the studios was rare and usually done on film. U-matic made some early inroads in news gathering as it was portable and didn’t have to be rushed to the lab for developing. The gear was still damn heavy well into the 80’s though. I once walked around for a while with a deck slung over one shoulder, the camera on the other and a battery belt around my waist. After taking all of that off I felt like I was on the moon for a little while. 😉

I’m going to assume Quad for that Mark Hamill video then. I can’t see any other videotape format available in '77 having that kind of quality. The quality is on par with at least Betacam SP, which didn’t come along until '86. I never realized that Quad was capable of such quality. I’d like to see a good Quad recording natively displayed on a professional CRT monitor (like a JVC Pro HV-M300VSU).