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.
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.