The image quality of television pictures has constantly changed for the past 75 years. Back in the early 1970s, television engineers told us the U-Matic tape format was not good enough for broadcast. Within a few years the 3/4-inch cassette transformed TV, creating the ENG revolution.
In the early 1980s, Betacam was introduced by Sony as a news-only format. The engineers told us then we had to keep using those backbreaking portable one-inch field recorders — the ones that closely resembled a large concrete block — if we wanted true broadcast-quality video.
