Re: Digibeta

I can't actually remember whether there were any DigiBeta cameras that had 4:3 chips in them. DigiBeta was launched in 1993, so that was about a year after the european "16:9 action plan" was launched. 16:9 SD got going in the UK, Australia and quite a lot of europe quite quickly so there was demand on this side of the pond for 16:9 DigiBeta in PAL right from the start, but it didn't in the USA so there wouldn't have been a marketing requirement for NTSC versions to have 16:9 chips.

I guess that researching Sony camcorders of the 1990s would provide an answer. (There have been other manufacturers in the DigiBeta market, e.g., Ampex and Thompson, who were mostly badge engineering Sony kit, Ikegami were around but I can't remember what they had in the way of 16:9 SD).

They're standard definition cameras because the pixel count and the broadcast bandwidth is the same as 4:3 standard def.