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I just ordered 4 NOS blank VHS tapes

posted 2 months ago by MaximRecoil (4268)
25 replies | jump to latest

Maxell HGX-Gold, which are supposed to be some of the best quality VHS tapes ever made:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/XTwAAOSwh6Jk1ScW/s-l1600.jpg

They are the first VHS tapes I've bought since the mid 1990s, and the first high-grade ones I've ever bought. In the '80s and '90s I always bought whatever general purpose ones they had at the local grocery store.

I'm on a mission to see just how good VHS can look. I already have a VCR that was top of the line when it was introduced in 1985; a JVC (the inventor of VHS) HR-D566U; its original MSRP was $900. It was the first VCR to feature JVC's "HQ" circuitry, and the full implementation of it at that, which is important for this "mission" because it increases VHS's resolution from about 240 TVL to about 250 TVL.

I've already done a test with it; I made a copy of The Terminator (1984) from the Blu-ray release and it looked drastically better than the official Thorn EMI VHS release. But I only had an old, well-used, cheap tape to record it on, so it has quite a bit of white speck artifacts that flash on the screen from time to time.

I think my first test with the new tapes will be with Revenge of the Ninja (1983), because I have the 4:3 DVD release to use as a source (it's best to use a 4:3 source to take full advantage of VHS's limited resolution), and because I still have a VHS copy of that movie that I made from a rental tape in 1989 (using a pair of inexpensive VCRs and an inexpensive GE-branded tape) that I can use as a quality comparison.

Most people have never seen VHS at or near its best (I never did until I did that test with The Terminator a couple years ago), because during VHS's heyday most people had low-end or mediocre VCRs, low-end or mediocre TVs, and they watched rental tapes or their own recordings of TV broadcasts, neither of which were very good.

Even people who had high-end TVs and VCRs were still limited by those not-so-great rental tapes and TV broadcast recordings. The best results back then would have come from recording from a LaserDisc (425 TVL), but I doubt many people did that. I never knew anyone who even owned a LaserDisc player.

[–] Heretic (306) 2 months ago

Hi there.

I have 7000 unique VHS tapes and own a VCR repair shop and a VHS online store.

Okay, you're looking for the highest quality ever?

Did you know that there are HD VHS tapes? Seriously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS

The difference in quality is insane. There's also S-VHS which aren't quite as good and are far more common.

These both have an option to have coaxial output instead of RCA which further improves quality.

[–] MaximRecoil (4268) 2 months ago

"Okay, you're looking for the highest quality ever?"

Yes, but specifically from VHS.

"Did you know that there are HD VHS tapes?"

Yes, but that's not VHS. It's a digital video format (MPEG-2), and for digital video I just use DVDs and Blu-rays (and video files ripped from them). There's also W-VHS which is an HD analog video format, recorded in component video (YPbPr) form like Betacam, but unlike Betacam, it's digitally processed before being output.

S-VHS is also not VHS, though it's much closer to VHS than W-VHS and D-VHS. It's essentially VHS with increased luma bandwidth, giving it a luma resolution on par with LaserDisc, but it suffers from having the same poor chroma resolution that VHS has.

"These both have an option to have coaxial output instead of RCA which further improves quality."

I don't know what you mean by that. RCA is coaxial. S-VHS has S-Video output (AKA: Y/C) and D-VHS has "component" (YPbPr) outputs which use 3 RCA cables for video (they usually have S-video output too, but component is better).

"Coaxial" just refers to a type of cable/connector which has a center conductor surrounded by an outer shield. It doesn't refer to a specific type of input/output signal. RF, composite, and component inputs/outputs all use coaxial cables even though they carry different types of signals. Coaxial cables intended for use with RF inputs/outputs typically have F-type connectors and ones intended for composite and component inputs/outputs typically have RCA connectors.