Betamovie

Betamovie was a series of consumer camcorders made by Sony for the Betamax videotape format. Each unit combined a video camera and a video recorder in one device and recorded onto standard Betamax cassettes. Sony built models for both the PAL and NTSC video standards. The first models, the BMC-100P for PAL and the BMC-110 for NTSC, were released in 1983, which made Betamovie the first commercial consumer camcorder in the world. Because of its design limits, a Betamovie unit could only record and could not play video back, so owners needed a separate Betamax deck to watch their footage. That limit, together with the decline of Betamax in the late 1980s and the arrival of rival camcorders, led Sony to drop the line in 1987 and turn to its newer Video8 format.