Are VHS Tapes As Bad As We Remember?

I can't stand watching anything less than 1080 unless I have to..... Nasty.....
 
I was one of the few that grew up with Betamax instead of VHS. It would be interesting to see what differences those offered with modern source material as well.
 
CrazyRob said:
I was one of the few that grew up with Betamax instead of VHS. It would be interesting to see what differences those offered with modern source material as well.
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VHS and Betamax had the same resolution: 330×480 (250 lines per picture height) for NTSC, 330×576 (250 lines per picture height) for PAL. Edit: well, Beta I and VHS HQ both had 250 lines while Beta II and VHS had 240 lines.

VHS dog food might taste a little worse than Betamax dog food, but neither one will fare well against 1080p filet mignon.
 
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VHS does have one satisfying aspect though, and that's sucking in the tape drive. Something just feels solid and right about that mechanical process.
NickJames said:
I dunno, sometimes I think I rather let my imagination fill in the blurry details.
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Eh, with a population of 7 billion, there are plenty of sloots that look good in 8K 3D.

It just requires a change in the porn industry, where the ugliest are no longer marketable, just like when motion pictures added audio and the actors that sounded stupid were out of work.
 
CrazyRob said:
I was one of the few that grew up with Betamax instead of VHS. It would be interesting to see what differences those offered with modern source material as well.
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This is recorded from a video game, but Beta at BII speed looks like crap compared to VHS at SP speed:
 
Having used both, I found that when recording over the air broadcasts, Beta at BII was visually the same as VHS at SP. At least on my gear. The advantage Beta had was that using the tapes of the time, you could get 4 STNG shows on one tape(L750) if you paused during the commercials. You could only get 2 shows on a common VHS tape(T120). This was when most shows had 45 minutes of actual show per hour.

What made VHS seem to suck so much was that most folks recorded at SLP speed. Sure you could get 6 hours on one tape but it usually looked like a bunch of colored blobs moving around on the screen. Then they would make copies for their friends which looked even worse.
 
Snicker the data format was only bad in that when the later plastic went through readers designed around the original metal film that was considered a safety hazard, they wear off and can not be played because the bits are in the wrong location on the film. Me and some friends used to use kids camcorders and the joke handy cams that came out in the late eighties plugged into a computer via an s-video cable. The quality was better and you could convert the 300x200 image to something easier to store, dvd-r disks. Then people started coping rentals and most of the equipment started coming with safety features to prevent recording directly to the computer, until web cams came out. That said if you have an old crt, a mpeg one encoder you can telesene the analog image to a screen or projector and re-film it at higher resolution. What companies do when they re-master a movie is they find a copy that has not been played before and project it onto a screen with no imperfections that is bolted in place and then film it using a higher quality digital capture system. But all the old film was metal film not plastic film until someone got cut by accident likely 8mm or 11mm stock. Those don't wear out from playing but they can snap and or corrode.

Most porn these days is totally computer generated. You shoot a dozen locations with no one in them, then you film women in swimsuits, then someone attempts to recreate them naked, then an animator poses them the way they think the human body works... I know several people that run some of the funnier sites, most people have so little grasp of what the human body actually looks like from all the years of people compositing images for the clothing ads that when people see something in footage they assume it is real. A fun thing to look for if you are into that type of thing the space between a woman legs is not wide enough for another human body unless the hips are angled up so when you see a woman sitting in a guys lap and his is sitting upright and she is... start laughing the person who created the porn has never seen people having sex... the knees have to be higher than the guys ribs in order for their bellies to be touching... snicker. People who have some one to try out some of the silly camera poses in porn must get really puzzled at first. The joke among my friends is that ninety percent of the shoots people like are physically impossible because of where the camera needs to be, usually about five feet behind the person to get what they want in the shot. But most of holly woods shots are the same way. You want lighting as if their is four walls you have to fake the lighting... you want a wide view of a narrow hallway you have to fake it in post. While I only know how holly wood and some of my female friends do it, I have a feeling that most of it totally fake, since it is easier to create a thousand women based on the two inches across the center of their face needing to be appealing the rest can sorta look right as long as most of the people looking at it have never seen a naked woman...
 
Why do people complain about VHS...considering it was "VHS or Go Back To ABC's Movie Of The Week", or whatever HBO decided they wanted to show you that month, you were SOL. The best part about VHS today are all the private tapes that people recorded, all the TV commercials and old news broadcasts and stuff that are now basically lost to time.....that's whats interesting today.

And when DVD finally hit, and the players didn't cost $1000 each...holy smokes, the audio alone blew you away..the visuals...full 720x480 resolution, on the then-brand-new Widescreen TV's.....and if you had a fancy Progressive Scan player so you didn't have interlacing....ZOMG. Tears of Joy...

LaserDisc was always one of those technologies where you knew of some guy who knew of some guy who's parents had it.....but it was like the chupacabra, a lot of people claimed to have seen it...but you sure never did
 
Pretty sure I had a VCR with SVideo output on it, not sure what he is taking about at the end...
 
Yes. Beta was superior :)

How could anyone love 240 lines of resolution ?
 
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Bad as we remember? I dunno... what's my point of comparison, it was fine for the 80s, by today's standards? they suck.
 
just like dvd quality blows next to 4k. It's all relative. I know watching shitty recordings on 6 hour EP tapes were better than nothing when I was a kid. On my CRT TV with an awful green cast that I had to tap every now and then to fix the picture.
 
drakken said:
Snicker the data format was only bad in that when the later plastic went through readers designed around the original metal film that was considered a safety hazard, they wear off and can not be played because the bits are in the wrong location on the film. Me and some friends used to use kids camcorders and the joke handy cams that came out in the late eighties plugged into a computer via an s-video cable. The quality was better and you could convert the 300x200 image to something easier to store, dvd-r disks. Then people started coping rentals and most of the equipment started coming with safety features to prevent recording directly to the computer, until web cams came out. That said if you have an old crt, a mpeg one encoder you can telesene the analog image to a screen or projector and re-film it at higher resolution. What companies do when they re-master a movie is they find a copy that has not been played before and project it onto a screen with no imperfections that is bolted in place and then film it using a higher quality digital capture system. But all the old film was metal film not plastic film until someone got cut by accident likely 8mm or 11mm stock. Those don't wear out from playing but they can snap and or corrode.

Most porn these days is totally computer generated. You shoot a dozen locations with no one in them, then you film women in swimsuits, then someone attempts to recreate them naked, then an animator poses them the way they think the human body works... I know several people that run some of the funnier sites, most people have so little grasp of what the human body actually looks like from all the years of people compositing images for the clothing ads that when people see something in footage they assume it is real. A fun thing to look for if you are into that type of thing the space between a woman legs is not wide enough for another human body unless the hips are angled up so when you see a woman sitting in a guys lap and his is sitting upright and she is... start laughing the person who created the porn has never seen people having sex... the knees have to be higher than the guys ribs in order for their bellies to be touching... snicker. People who have some one to try out some of the silly camera poses in porn must get really puzzled at first. The joke among my friends is that ninety percent of the shoots people like are physically impossible because of where the camera needs to be, usually about five feet behind the person to get what they want in the shot. But most of holly woods shots are the same way. You want lighting as if their is four walls you have to fake the lighting... you want a wide view of a narrow hallway you have to fake it in post. While I only know how holly wood and some of my female friends do it, I have a feeling that most of it totally fake, since it is easier to create a thousand women based on the two inches across the center of their face needing to be appealing the rest can sorta look right as long as most of the people looking at it have never seen a naked woman...
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The fuck you just say?
 
We had VHS, then Laserdisc. We did go for the Super VHS for a while, along with the camcorder for it.

Yes, it's all as bad as I remember. I had to hook up a VCR the other day for safety videos at work. It sucked.


BUT - this is the huge thing. Hook it up to a 1080P LCD and it'll look like ass. Same with the older video game consoles. They were designed for CRT's. Hook those up to CRT's, and the image looks better. Not sharper, but it's better. Not better than DVD on the same TV, but vs. an LCD TV.

VHS on CRT is better than VHS on LCD. Still looks like shit compared to the others, but to make it a better comparison, IMO.
 
This has been beaten to death over the years. Beta had superior picture because of its modulation scheme. VHS won because a 2 hour movie could fit on to one cassette.

I agree with Ur_Mom, without a CRT display, either looks like garbage. You really need an analog display to show an analog piece of media.

As a guy who had a Faroudja line doubler, you can only polish a turd so much.

The only VHS version that wasn't terrible, which I think very few people ever saw in the US, was WVHS. It was a high speed version that could record analog high definition. We had a couple decks at the TV station that I worked at for demos. It was really incredible at the time.

No matter what, please be kind and rewind.

BP
 
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Even though the quality is crap compared to modern stuff I still find VHS movies charming. Maybe it's because I grew up with VHS movies and it brings back many good memories of watching movies when I was a kid or having friends over and going out and renting some movies to watch when they stayed over on the weekends.

I feel the same way about cheesy 90's FMV video games, scanlines and all.
 
When it was the best you had at the time, it was fine.

I had a huge collection of Widescreen VHS editions. Only got one left, my first Widescreen issue of Star Wars that is the original unmolested version.
 
TechLarry said:
Yes. Beta was superior :)

How could anyone love 240 lines of resolution ?
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I have to expand on what I posted earlier about resolution of VHS and Betamax. Betamax's Beta I was 250 lines while VHS was 240 lines, but Beta II reduced to 240 lines to increase recording time while VHS HQ increased to 250 lines to match Betamax. I am not persuaded that consumers would have been able to tell the difference between 240 lines and 250 lines on most TVs and recorders of that era.
 
HeadRusch said:
Why do people complain about VHS...considering it was "VHS or Go Back To ABC's Movie Of The Week", or whatever HBO decided they wanted to show you that month, you were SOL. The best part about VHS today are all the private tapes that people recorded, all the TV commercials and old news broadcasts and stuff that are now basically lost to time.....that's whats interesting today.

And when DVD finally hit, and the players didn't cost $1000 each...holy smokes, the audio alone blew you away..the visuals...full 720x480 resolution, on the then-brand-new Widescreen TV's.....and if you had a fancy Progressive Scan player so you didn't have interlacing....ZOMG. Tears of Joy...

LaserDisc was always one of those technologies where you knew of some guy who knew of some guy who's parents had it.....but it was like the chupacabra, a lot of people claimed to have seen it...but you sure never did
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I had Laserdiscs and got my friends into them as well.
There was one rental place that rented Lasers and I would rent them and copy them onto S-VHS tapes to watch again later.
I still have a few discs, but no players, both of my Pioneer dual sided players failed and I never bothered looking for a replacement.

I did sell some of my Disney Lasers to a member here or on AvsForums a few years back, but I kept The Little Mermaid and a few others.

laserdiscs2.jpg


laserdiscs.jpg
 
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If you're old enough to remember watching VHS, you know the answer is, EASILY, YES. They're as bad as we remember.

DVD was a godsend.
 
Tossed piles of them in the garbage about 10 years ago. Back then they were hard to sell because nobody wanted them. Anything that was worth keeping was transferred to a digital format.

I don't miss VHS even though it was a big part of my teens and 20s.
 
Ur_Mom said:
BUT - this is the huge thing. Hook it up to a 1080P LCD and it'll look like ass. Same with the older video game consoles. They were designed for CRT's. Hook those up to CRT's, and the image looks better. Not sharper, but it's better. Not better than DVD on the same TV, but vs. an LCD TV.

.
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i think my all my old consoles look great on my LCD and Plasma TV. Way better than VHS ever would. Hell even old Atari systems look fine. Kind of hard for a square to not look like a bigger square.
 
Anyone remember CED discs? They were like the vinyl record version of laser discs. I was the younger kid so I was always the one that had to get up and flip the disc halfway through the movie. We had one of those, then had a Betamax, then finally went to VHS. My folks made terrible decisions on technology lol.

The VHS I particularly remember was always recorded stuff, a lot of times on the same tape for a year over and over since I never saved it after I watched it, and It really was terrible once you recorded over stuff 30+ times. The Beta seemed to hold up way better in that regard. DVRs are the future I always dreamed of then, but now I rarely find anything on TV worth watching/recording.
 
Forget VHS/Beta!! Every Star Wars aficionado knows that you really haven't seen Star Wars (aka Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope) until you have viewed the black & white, selected scenes Super 8 version!!

super8.jpg
 
VHS is nice because it was super easy to immediately record something. The quality was absolute garbage though.
 
evilsofa said:
I have to expand on what I posted earlier about resolution of VHS and Betamax. Betamax's Beta I was 250 lines while VHS was 240 lines, but Beta II reduced to 240 lines to increase recording time while VHS HQ increased to 250 lines to match Betamax. I am not persuaded that consumers would have been able to tell the difference between 240 lines and 250 lines on most TVs and recorders of that era.
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Oh, we were. It was easy to see the difference. It wasn't just resolution.
 
Sill have my S-VHS player. need to transfer some old tapes that are out of print before everything falls apart :p
 
ButtonPuncher said:
VHS won because a 2 hour movie could fit on to one cassette.
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That was only the initial problem. 2 hr beta cassettes were soon available.
AND because of the marketing. JVC simply out marketed Sony, the same way Microsoft out marketed Apple and IBM in the 90's to command the OS market with a crappier product.

daglesj said:
When it was the best you had at the time, it was fine.
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^this. Growing up in the 60's, with ONE black and white 16" TV for the whole family, having color and a 25" set in 1985 and being able to time shift, easily rent 6 month old release movies and pron on every other corner, was heaven.

SVHS and then DVHS were quite good on a 27" Sony Trinitron XBR set. I, also, still have stuff on standard VHS. Guess it's time to convert it to digital so I can play the tiny windows on my 55" lcd screen and bitch about the video quality.
 
Don't forget cassette tapes too. Though cassettes were better loved cuz w/o which where would we be w/o mix tapes?
 
Ducman69 said:
VHS does have one satisfying aspect though, and that's sucking in the tape drive. Something just feels solid and right about that mechanical process.
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Yeah, and then the crunching sound it makes when it eats the tape and you have to literally disassemble the player to get all the little shreds of tape out.

Then if you want to watch the same thing again, you have to go out and buy/rent another copy.

Don't forget when the heads get dirty/go bad and the lines start showing up on the screen.

And then if the belt or motor starts going bad you have to deal with the tape dragging and not playing at the correct speed.

And the tape wearing out after so many times of it being watched.

VHS was absolute crap ever since it was first released.
 
Ur_Mom said:
We had VHS, then Laserdisc. We did go for the Super VHS for a while, along with the camcorder for it.

Yes, it's all as bad as I remember. I had to hook up a VCR the other day for safety videos at work. It sucked.


BUT - this is the huge thing. Hook it up to a 1080P LCD and it'll look like ass. Same with the older video game consoles. They were designed for CRT's. Hook those up to CRT's, and the image looks better. Not sharper, but it's better. Not better than DVD on the same TV, but vs. an LCD TV.

VHS on CRT is better than VHS on LCD. Still looks like shit compared to the others, but to make it a better comparison, IMO.
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It really depends on the LCD that you hook up the old systems to. Most have horrible scalers and make lower resolution stuff look like crap.

One of the best I have ever used as far as LCDs for use with older video games systems is a Dell 1907Fp using a Viewsonic converter that we got way back in the day just for the purpose using with old systems.

But without the converter it also works great for a Dreamcast with the VGA box. Only does 640x480, but the scaler in both the Dell and the Westinghouse below makes it look just as good as if I were using a CRT.

My Westinghouse 40" 120Hz 1080p TV doesn't do a bad job either with the native inputs.
 
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