A great video! I had to watch the VHS produced version for the extra nostalgia! Many thanks!

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

Thanks for watching!

I remember recording TV shows using a VCR. VHS had an advantage over Beta because it had longer recording times. On a T-120 VHS tape, you could record up to 6 hours of video content. However recording in EP mode came at a price. Since the speed of the tape was much slower, the picture quality suffered. Some manufacturers tried to get around this by putting more heads on the video drum. Toshiba had a VHS VCR with 6 heads, rather than 4 heads. Then there was Super VHS, which supposed to improve picture quality. Back in the day, recording at such speeds was advantageous, as you could record up to 6 hours, albeit with a loss of quality. But those were the days!!

@kingforaday8725

3 ай бұрын

Me too. I still have some and watch them not for the TV show but the commercials, news, weather, and sports that would sometimes get recorded if I wasnt sitting there manually pausing during the breaks.

This was pretty interesting! The diamond pattern behind you actually becomes so soft the edges appear rounded in the lowest quality.

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

That background makes it easy to see the difference. Also the text on my shirt and the TV behind me.

I always recorded things that I care about on SP.

I am watching your footage on a low end mobile device from 2019. And it looks great. 😊

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

It's doesn't look bad at all on a mobile device.

Yeah the resolution sucks compared to today but back then videotape was about equal to broadcast in quality, especially on old small tube TV's. Like a 25in CRT was high class!

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

You're absolutely right! I felt like a king watching our 25" TV hooked to that Hitachi VCR.

@MikinessAnalog

3 ай бұрын

You would be surprised how many people thought DVD was HD, pre-Blu-ray.

One thing that doesn't show well in your comparison of SP to LP and EP is the increase in noise that we used to get in the picture on some machines. 4 head machines often had a pair of 58 micron heads optimized for recording and playing SP, and a pair of 19 micron heads optimized for recording and playing EP. By 1988, LP was disappearing from most machines since it would take 29 micron heads to be optimized for that speed. I noticed that the tape you put in the machine was an SVHS tape and if that's what you used, that may have increased your quality on the slower speeds, but if you'd used a typical standard grade VHS tape from the mid to late 80s, the EP would have had a lot more visible noise than the SP due to going from 58 micron track width to 19 microns. I found that the audio quality in HiFi was barely affected going from SP to LP to EP, but the linear audio degraded significantly since the speed changes from 33.3 mm/s to 11.1 mm/s across a stationary head. That should cut the frequency response to a third and increase audio noise as well. HiFi did not suffer much going from SP to EP and I made some 6 hour music compiliation tapes in HiFi in 1987 and they still beat audio cassette quality at the EP speed. That Panasonic with the 2 head openings had 2 heads in each one, probably a 58 micron pair and a 19 micron pair as mentioned earlier. Later machined in the final years of VHS were made with only 19 micron heads, meaning SP was no better than EP and 2 / 3 of your tape would be blank after recording on SP with a huge "guard band".

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

I used a Maxell HGx Gold VHS tape for the actual speed demos. When I recorded the segments inside the VCR, all I had open was that SVHS tape, so I used that for the demo. Good catch! My VHS dub was done in SVHS to minimize generational loss on those segments.

@user-rt9zq8rs9k

3 ай бұрын

I wish I could still buy a Panasonic SVHS VCR when they were still quality built . I loved using the LP speed because I couldn't tell the difference between SP and LP .

The audio takes a noticeable hit but I personally find it hard to see much of a visual difference between LP and EP. The main drop in quality from SP to LP seems to be that the background becomes blown out, wonder why that happens? Also, I noticed this video was recorded onto VHS with letterboxing and then cropped back to widescreen so we aren’t getting the full 480 vertical lines of resolution. I think a more fair representation of VHS resolution would be to record the tape with the video squished to 4:3 and then stretch it back out to squeeze as much resolution out of the tape as possible, or to natively produce a 4:3 video. Most of the stuff we would capture from the era was either natively Fullscreen or Pan and Scan so we would’ve gotten the full 480i lines from those.

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

I squeezed the video horizontally to record to tape and expanded it back out during capture, so I wasn't cropping or zooming the captured footage. I'll upload what the original VHS looked like with the compressed image to my Patreon page.

@nooneinpart

3 ай бұрын

@@VintageElectronicsChannel Fascinating, the thin horizontal bars on the top and bottom of the VHS segments (or I guess, VHS on VHS) and the really clean bottom edge of the video was what made me think that. The bottom edge is usually a bit skewed and the vertical resolution is softer than what I'm used to when fiddling with my own captures, but I'll hazard a guess rather than a statement about deinterlacing this time.

That VCR in the background looks like a Hitachi VT-33. VT-33 is the PAL model number so not sure if that'll be the same for the NTSC version. The PAL version of this Hitachi is SP only so it's maximum recording time was 4 hours on an E-240 cassette (E-300's did exist by the late 90's but they used very thin tape - roughly the same physical length of tape as a T-200 as both gave 10 hours recording in their respective slowest speeds). PAL-SP ran slower than NTSC-SP due to the lower frame rate, so E-180 = T-120, E-240 = T-160 etc. When VHS first launched in the UK in 1978 the maximum recording time was only 3 hours, and I don't remember seeing the longer 4 hour cassette until around 1983. The first PAL-LP machines capable of recording 6 or 8 hours per tape probably arrived around this time too, but I didn't get a VCR with the LP mode until around 1987. PAL-EP/SLP did eventually arrive in the early 2000's but only from certain manufacturers (JVC/Panasonic/Sharp) and the quality was terrible but it did give 9 or 12 hour recording times or 15 hours if you used the very thin E-300 cassettes.

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

My Hitachi is from sometime around 1983/1984. It does have all three speeds for NTSC: SP, LP, and EP. I have a PAL VCR somewhere around here, I'll have to dig it out and take a look at it. Mine would be from 1992 or before, so I'm sure it's just SP/LP.

I would rather watch a movie with the quality content we grew up on on VHS, rather than the slew of garbage movies today played at 4K.

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

Good point. It's more about the quality of the content, rather than the quality of the format.

I recorded hundreds of hours of TV shows. Occasionally I will watch one of these old recordings not to watch the TV show but for the commercials, news, weather, and sports that would sometimes also get recorded if I wasnt sitting there hitting the pause button.

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

Old commercials always bring back memories.

i have an original working rca vbt-200 the first vcr ever sold in the u.s. i also have a w-vhs vcr that was the first hd format as well as a dvhs recorder the jvc 4000u

@djlolerkoster

3 ай бұрын

Damn, too bad w-vhs wasnt made in larger quantities. I guess victor just did not think about it as something that would ever leave pro users thus there wasnt much demand for it. But hey man, at least you could get it and simply use it unlike us in europe whod have to have a step down transformer since i do not recall a single 240v wvhs

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

WVHS seemed like it came and went quickly. I remember reading about it, but never saw one for sale where I lived.

Watching this VHS recording in 1080p HD

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

Feels wrong, doesn't it. Lol

@MikinessAnalog

3 ай бұрын

@@VintageElectronicsChannel Anything above 480p on this video appears the same, for obvious reasons.

Well said! I am a newer subscriber.

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

Thanks for subscribing, it means a lot to me!

VHS only looks good on CRT IMO..

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

Totally agree. When producing this, I was actually surprised how good it looked on my CRT monitor. It was as good as I remember.

Did you record anamorphically, or 4:3 and then cropped? If you like magic of the VHS, I release films on this format.

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

Anamorphically. I didn't want to zoom and crop and lose resolution.

@SFtheGreat

3 ай бұрын

@@VintageElectronicsChannel Truly a man of culture. Not everyone would think to record like that. I release films in anamorphic widescreen, something I have never seen on any commercial release, though there were squeeze LDs with anamorphic picture.

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

Where can I check out your releases?

ALL tape formats we're doomed.

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

Technically, yes.

I used hifi vhs for audio archiving in slp mode. Even then it's still better sound than the standard audio reel-to-reel speed, albeit was far more touchy and produced buzz in sync with video head revolution if it had tracking issues.

I don't really see any advantage of watching a movie in 4K and watching the same movie on Tape or DVD. As for music the pops and clicks and other imperfections you get used to while listening. As for video it is the same, your mind will absorb the quantity you watch, after a movie I never say, hey that was awsome quality because I watched in blue-ray quality. Watching 5 minutes of this video I got used to the qualty and did not mind the lack of colours and the unsharp quality Video has. Maybe people like us (I'm 50) don't mind imperfections at our age and can enjoy things just as much, maybe even more than young aged people.

@VintageElectronicsChannel

3 ай бұрын

We've lived through those formats and the quality they delivered. Younger generation always had crystal clear music and HD video.

vhs was not so bad as this example.