From Creative Cow - Mark Suszko -We standardized on Panasonic's DVCPro25 soon after it came out, (Would have considered Sony, but they were two years behind on shipping a product at the time) to replace our aging beta SP decks and cameras, and sending out dubs on that format is also very cheap, as is archiving: you get something like half a week's worth of play hours in the same shelf space one, hour-long, type-c one-inch tape used to take up. While it is only SD, this format is widely compatible on a number of machines, our decks can read DVC pro, DVCAm, and consumer mini-dv. The new HD DVC pro decks are also backwards-compatable to play the legacy Dv25 material. A Dv25 signal also takes up minimal space on hard drives, and since our flow is all SDI in and out for editing, we keep everything looking essentially first-generation. Yes, even umatic may have had better color resolution, but in side by side quality comparisons betwen the DVD and Beta SP, no contest, the disk is better, and will STAY better longer. No worries about mangled, de-magged, or flaking tapes.
 

PeterD - Everyone is "doing" HD then down converting to Beta Sp or DigiBeta to deliever thier content anyway. That's the part they don't like to tell ya. :)