1" recording machine

The succesor of the Quadruplex system. It was developed in the seventies by the West-German company Bosch Fernseh. It uses half the tape width, 1 inch, and the head drum rotates at 9000 RPM. One reel could hold 96 minutes of recording, later versions offered up to 120 minutes.

This technology has been later replaced by systems that used a tape stored in cassettes, which dramatically eased their use. Reel-to-reel machines required manual insertion of the tape into the complicated tape drive. The first mass-used cassette system was called U-matic. It was succeeded by Betacam, Betacam SP and Betacam Digital, which continue to be used until today. At the beginning, this techology was extremely expensive, but later some systems for household use also appeared. Since 1972, the Philips company offered their VCR system. In 1976, Sony introduced their Betamax system and one year later, the VHS system was launched by the Japanese company JVC. In 1979, European companies Philips and Grundig introduced the Video 2000 system which was notable for its use of two-sided cassettes with twice the playing time of the other systems. The cassette could be turned over just as the audio cassette. The "Video tape format war" ensued and the VHS system won. The systems for domestic use offered reduced image quality, whereas the professional formats stored the image in full quality.