Any good troubleshooting book about Betamax?
 

Does anyone know of any good (text) books, such as Troubleshooting and Repair by Capelo & Brenner, that deal with Betamax and/or Betacam/SP?

I've looked several times, and I can't really find much for just Betamax. Usually it's part of a general VCR book, like the one from Capelo. Betamax and VHS were so alike, that it's probably silly to split it into a VHS and Betamax book. Instead, they all do one, and talk about both formats where needed.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/075...&tag=thdifa-20

Most of what you see is "historical". I use quotes because a great many of them are revisionist regarding the facts. Many have an underdog worship for the format, but either gloss over or ignore the long list of grievances people had with it. I was old enough in the 80s to know it wasn't any better than VHS -- not really. It's not like Hi8 was -- now that was a good format (no chroma errors!)

betas SUCK to work on - as with all Sony product they are over-complicated over-engineered cuckoo-clocks
parts are also rapidly becoming unobtainium - a huge chuck of the betas on ebay are broken and most are not worth repairing.
the only decks even worth bothering with are the SL-HF2100 and the 2 Beta-ED decks
those are the only ones with S-video outputs