The Sony SL-8000UB was the first Betamax model introduced in the U.K. around December 1978. Hot on the heels of JVC's VHS home deck, which had reached Britain a month or two earlier, the Sony machine was a little larger than the JVC yet it took slightly smaller tapes. Running time of the smaller Betamax tapes was maximum 3 hours 15 minutes - a quarter of an hour longer than VHS could offer at the time. The Betamax system, with its slower tape speed, offered better picture quality but slightly worse sound.
The scene was set for the video format wars of the 1980's. With seemingly little to choose between the two competing systems, sales started off roughly neck-and-neck. It was only when big rental companies like Thorn-EMI (Radio Rentals, D.E.R., Rent-a-Center etc.) sided with VHS that fortunes started to change. Historically, EMI and JVC (inventors of VHS) are distantly related. EMI, The Gramophone Company, owns the famous 'dog and gramophone' trademark in the UK. JVC uses it under license in Japan. It did not take long for the two companies to do a deal which resulted in JVC supplying Thorn-EMI in the UK with VHS VCRs for their rental shops, and EMI, a huge publisher of pre-recorded music, to start making pre-recorded video movies - on VHS, of course. The rest, as they say, is history.
Back in 1978 however, the SL-8000 was very much a contender in the video format race. In common with early 'piano-key' VCRs, it had no picture search. Betamax would become the first home video format to offer such a facility, but for the time being, Sony introduced another model SL-8080UB with the equally-useful Automatic Program Search.
APS works simply by adding a hidden 'cue' signal to the start of each new recording. Since the tape in a Sony Betamax stays wrapped around the heads during rewind anf fast forward, the head picks up these cue signals as the tape travels past. If APS is switched on, whenever a cue signal is detected during rewind or fast forward the deck stops with a loud 'clunk' that I found unnerving at first. In this way, the tape is stopped at the beginning of each recording - as long as it was made on a machine which records the cue signals.
Somebody gave me a SL-8080UB several years ago but I didn't hang on to it. This is about all I can remember about the machine: Big, heavy, brown coloured cabinet; 3-day single-event timer; tape counter with memory; APS instead of picture search.