Tom's Life Bits

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===== VHS vs Digital Resolutions =====
**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:\\

VHS resolution is approximately represented by the “VCD” box here. VHS carried an effective horizontal resolution of about 200–250 lines, or about 1/5 that of the lowest-quality (720p) flavor of HD, and about 1/20 that of the best (4K) resolution commercially available today.\\

The now-defunct Sound+Vision magazine published these comparisons in the early days of Blu-Ray:\\

(Left to right: VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray). Extending this to 4K would show another dramatic jump in quality. It’s also worth noting that the VHS captures here would have been done with high-end equipment under optimal conditions; depending on the limitations of a particular tape, player, or TV the results would likely have been worse.

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.\\

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