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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.