Differences

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--- photo:vhs_vs_digital_resolutions [2019/10/20 09:38] – created 192.168.1.5
+++ photo:vhs_vs_digital_resolutions [2019/10/20 09:53] (current) – 192.168.1.5
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 **Are the quality of VHS tapes really as bad as we may have remembered?**\\
 Yes, pretty much.\\
 This perception is driven largely by the switch to HD resolution — and now 4K — for nearly everything.\\
 This chart (from Wikimedia commons) tells the story:\\
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 Make no doubt: VHS and the ability to record and time-shift programming was pretty revolutionary in its day. For television shows — which were created in native NTSC — it provided a reasonable and fully-usable facsimile of the original. Seen in retrospect, it is clearly a barely-acceptable way to approximate material that started out in higher-resolution formats, such as film or high-res digital sources.\\
+It’s fashionable today to remember VHS as borderline unwatchable. That’s not so. At around the time they were popular, VHS was a perfectly adequate recording and playback system for the CRT televisions we had around at the time. You were unlikely to confuse a VHS tape for a live broadcast, but the quality was perfectly functional.
+Any like-for-like comparison between VHS, DVD, and Bluray is going to obviously show VHS for what it is - but what’s the difference between a car that does 60mph and a car that does 280mph, if you’re only driving to the grocery shop down the road?
+We were all watching these things in 21 inch CRT televisions, if we were lucky. Until 2003, I had a 14 inch portable with the VHS player built in. It worked. It did what it was invented for. It made me happy. Now I’ve got a 55″ OLED and Bluray and 4K and God-knows-what-else… It works. It does what it was invented for. It makes me happy.
+At the same time, let’s not be under any misconception - they are not in any way “high quality” according to any modern comparison. But it wasn’t as bad as people like to pretend it was.