Was VHS Video really that bad ?

[kevin]

Was VHS Video better than you remember ?

VHS Video was terrible right ?  Awful snowy washed out picture quality,  distorted rolling images.    Yeah...  sadly a lot of  T.V. VHS recordings do look like terrible and then there are those that were made from solid source or that rare clear day in analog T.V. reception ...   wow..  They can look almost as good first generation DVD discs..  I said almost :)

 In this video I share my experience reliving the VHS video collect of my youth.    We have a mixture of VHS tapes dating back to the mid to late 1980's.   Most are recording form local television at the time.  Which are mind blowing for other reasons,  but mainly the commercials..   wow.. terrible .

While the older tapes do seem to be fragile; the video signal recorded upon them is better than expected.   There's a few reason for that,  namely a good quality VCR , Decent VHS tapes and  clear analog TV Reception.    In later years those tings all got progressively worse.   Our TV reception slowly became worse; added to that cheap quality VHS tapes which in combination meant that many of  newer VHS records; are basically unwatchable.   Which is a shame.

 Anyway; this was my experience with VHS video tapes..  Feel free to tells us what your experiences with VHS video has been..   I guessing mostly BAD :)

--- [ CREDITS ] --------------------------------------------------------------

    Buy VHS Video Player
    Convert VHS to Digital / DVD
    Camera: Motorola Motog9 Plus

    Video:
    Kevin Picone  http://underwaredesign.com - http://playbasic.com

    Music:
    The Sleeping Prophet - Jesse Gallagher


-- [ Movie Clips ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Back To The Future (VHS vs DVD)
    Starwars  (VHS)
    National Rodeo Championships  (VHS recorded from Satellite TV)
    & Many more.

-- [ Hash Tags ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------

   #VHS  #VIDEO #DVD

[stevmjon]

i found out that originally there was VHS and BETA video players to begin with. apparently BETA was a superior quality, but more expensive. so people bought the cheaper version and BETA went bust.
this is such a shame. i am not sure what the price difference was, but i thought people would have chosen the better quality.
on top of the inferior VHS, when you bought tapes for it there were a lot of cheap quality tapes too. my cousin used to record a lot of TV shows, and he used to get mad at the poor recording quality.
some were so bad he would snap the tape in half.

another story, for cars there was 2 types of windscreen you could buy. laminated (double thickness glass) and non-laminated (single thickness glass). what was suprising the price difference was only $20.
so a lot of people bought the cheaper one (non-laminated), but the problem was when a stone hit this windscreen it shattered across the whole glass so you couldn't see through it. this happened to me with a car i bought. so i replaced it with the better laminated windsceen. these ones just chip slighly when hit by a stone. now, it is actually law to have laminated (double glass) as standard.

[kevin]

 Hey Steve,

 

i found out that originally there was VHS and BETA video players to begin with. apparently BETA was a superior quality, but more expensive. so people bought the cheaper version and BETA went bust.
this is such a shame. i am not sure what the price difference was, but i thought people would have chosen the better quality.

   Yeah that one of the big format wars of many format wars to come.   Beta was generally a better format (and the primary format used in TV product for decades), and initially they were easy to buy too, well  here at least.    But VHS just used a better strategy, focusing more media licensing making it easy for movie distributors to embrace their format and customer to get the films they wanted.   

    Early video stores used to stock both for a number of years, but soon there was delays/ issues with content coming to beta.  Once that happened the war was won.   Most people just weren't wiling to wait for a movie to be the release on Beta and some smaller movies weren't.  Furthering compounding the downward spiral. 

    There have so many of these media format wars in our life time..   Vinyl -> Cassette -> CD -> Laser DISC - Video CD- DVD -> Blurray etc etc 

on top of the inferior VHS, when you bought tapes for it there were a lot of cheap quality tapes too. my cousin used to record a lot of TV shows, and he used to get mad at the poor recording quality.
some were so bad he would snap the tape in half.

   yeah sadly we've plenty of dodgy looking recordings from free to air TV.   While most are fantastic trip down memory lane,  visually most are grainy / wavey and generally out of sync.   I'm not too sure that's the formats fault though as given a good input signal; such as from satellite TV.   The results are pretty clean.   

   Like all contact medias the actual media degrades over time.   So playing an old tape can actually damage it. 

another story, for cars there was 2 types of windscreen you could buy. laminated (double thickness glass) and non-laminated (single thickness glass). what was suprising the price difference was only $20.
so a lot of people bought the cheaper one (non-laminated), but the problem was when a stone hit this windscreen it shattered across the whole glass so you couldn't see through it. this happened to me with a car i bought. so i replaced it with the better laminated windsceen. these ones just chip slighly when hit by a stone. now, it is actually law to have laminated (double glass) as standard.

    I wasn't aware of that...   But as you know Price is huge limiting factor the majority of people.   So given an option between similar products and many of us will choose the more cost effective solution. 

    There's a saying my old man used to have which was something along the lines of that "buying cheap is easiest way to waste money in the long run"  which tends to be true; we cheap out of something only to discover it doesn't last very long and we're back replacing or repairing it.