The thing is, it wasn’t bad quality… just seems it now because we have the tech that we do. No way in ‘87 would I have said “I can’t watch this, quality is terrible”
@@shinyhorse8045 Im 42 and yes..spoiled to the core but when you watched vhs tapes in very bad condition even for.. mm 1990 i remember that i started to curse a lot.. jajaaa.
@SlowHandMcQueeg I'm 41, my grandparents at that time had some beta tape and no it wasn't soooooooooooo much better, it was just slightly better but not by much, I remember. If I'm not mistaken 8-bit guy has a comparison vid between vhs and beta on his channel and pretty much confirms my argument and drills your into the ground. So stfu with hyperbolic BS.
I grew up in the 70s watching hockey on a 13" B&W T.V. with rabbit ears. Now I can't change the channel fast enough if I end up on a non-HD channel by mistake on my 65" 4K. Like you said, we accept what we have.
Unfortunately for me, the teachers always played crap like Barney which the rest of my class seemed to enjoy. All I could do is sit there and think, "What the hell is wrong with you people." I also use to get in trouble for not wanting to watch Barney or take naps with the rest of the class.
I miss the whole VHS "process." The whole "be kind rewind" at rental stores, the large plastic case(including the snapping sound), buying blank ones to record, forgetting to snap off the tab and recording over a favorite event.
Not once did I ever think that vhs was bad growing up. When dvds came out I was only excited about the amount of space on the shelf they would save and not the boost in quality.
I loved DVDs because I was (and still am) a film nerd and the directors commentary blew me away. I loved hearing the filmmakers and actors talk about the film
@@SpongeSebastian They did but were expensive and needed a writable DVD which were also expensive, they gradually became common and cheaper but we were moving onto sd cards and usbs.
OldClam5 VHS was a pain with all the rewinding and so on I admit. But there were many movies out on video that have yet to be released on dvd, or versions that have been released but have had scenes edited out. So unless you’ve kept a version of the movie on Video of which you can get transferred to a dvd, it could be hard work trying to find a version, or an original version of what you’re looking for.
I still have many VHS tapes and quite a few of the plastic cases. Since I store my tapes in boxes but love the cases, I use the cases as storage boxes. I can make that sound any time I want... Beautiful sound for VHS fans.
@@danimcfly5992 haha yeah!! Luckily though for me I've got my mate lol he's obviously not got a full shops worth but one of his livingroom walls is just VHS and it's a big room! So many I have never even heard of!
It will be 2080 and I'll probably still have my VHS tape collection if every single one of them manages to stay intact and not get destroyed in some kind of flooding or house fire.
Yeah, just give it some more time & we'll be nostalgic for dvds & Blu-rays, once they're obsolete. I know i'm gonna hold onto mine. I will never accept streaming. I want a physical copy of a movie or tv show, to own.
Television screens are a series of dots like pixels watching a VHS tape on say a 14'' the picture quality was reasonable but change it to a big tv say a 25--29'' then you will notice the difference, do not sit to close it looks ok but get in close the picture quality is not as good, i am not sure if the dots ( sorry i can remember the correct name ) varied between say a cheap tv and a higher quality tv.
I don't like streaming services, so luckily i don't have to experience opening the netflix app. I do enjoy popping in a BD though, retains part of the VHS era. ^^
They were never that bad, they just got outdated. Everything for the time was literally the best until the next best thing comes along then we get spoilt by it.
LCD screens were better only on resolution and size/weight against CRTs, everything else (color, contrast, brightness, viewing angle, response time) got much worse and things are only catching up now
My local movie store had to stop charging because literally nobody rewinded the movies. I did, because I'm not a fucking lazy twat. But most people around here just didn't bother. It always sucked when I used to rent a movie and had the rewind the damn thing.
Thats fine , tape what you like . The only thing is the resolution sucks . Colors bleed with technology tv that we have . I had in the early 2000 a DvD recorder that used blank discs the same way as tapes but you couldn't tape over them . I used to reuse the spool to hold all the discs that had 2 - 3 movies on each one . You can find old machines and I know where one is that Im willing to swap with the owner since they only use it to watch movies.
just started collecting myself. as part of growing up in the 90s / 2000s, Family never had $ to rent @ blockbuster so now I have over 100 titles & play them everyday every hour once i'm home.
Happened to a very dear recording from 2003 here. It frazzled a good 10 seconds of it - I thankfully was able to save the rest. Cause: a plastic pillar that had come loose and decided it wouldn’t catch onto the tape. Instead of just rejecting it, the tape was already out, fully exposed and it got caught in the rest of the mechanism as it ejected. So much fun. I took for granted that it would happen eventually. Got a new machine, top of the bill late 2007 build, and have been happy since 👍 as for the precious tape: it comes out at special occasions only 😂
As a kid in the 80s just the fact that I could watch cartoons when they weren’t being broadcast on tv was a big thing. We didn’t care about picture quality, because most tvs were the same (the big fuss was if your friend’s folks had a big tv, which in those days might have had a screen somewhere in the mid 20 inches!). I have a handful of VHS for nostalgia but for me the leap to DVD was phenomenal. The picture was massively better, no rewinding, able to skip to any part of the film and all the extras! Sure, the piracy ads were a pain but you just did something else whilst they were on (and with how slow Blu ray can be it was preferable). I have found a lot of those ads can be skipped or fast forwarded anyway.
VHS was much better for cartoons anyway, they look just fine, the picture quality only really starts to look bad with live action, and even that's only because we're now playing these tapes on flat screens 5 times bigger than anything they were designed to be played on
you guys are probably native english speakers so maybe did not care so much. But another great advantage of DVDs was being able to choose your audio language and subtitle tracks, which is a big leap as well if you live in a country with systematic and not always nice audio dubbing.
Looking back, VHS does look bad. But only because we are now use to better video. VHS was about the best we had for home use at the time. It is nice to have lived long enough to do the comparison.
There were the odd enthusiasts that were into Laserdiscs at the time. I knew no one personally that had any but my high school music teacher had a Laserdisc player for the classroom upon which we watched West Side Story. That always struck me as hilarious, not only having a machine that not a lot of people own but also a movie that not lot of those people would probably buy for it. :)
I had a laserdisc player with about a dozen or so movies, and they did have a somewhat higher video quality than VHS, plus CD-quality digital sound. The biggest selling point for me at the time was that they tended to be letterboxed, showing the full width of the movie, while VHS versions tended to use the severely cropped "pan & scan" format. Eventually, DVDs hit the scene, which had a slightly higher quality than the analog-video laserdisc.
Beta had better quality than VHS, Beta only lost because of its shorter duration tapes. Oh, and Laser Disk had the best quality for home use at the time.
I have some Laserdiscs now but they're more for just novelty. I only paid a couple bucks for each, two of them being Ghostbusters I & II. :) The overwhelming majority of my video collection is VHS and I'm perfectly okay with that. I'm not all that hung up on picture quality when it comes to old movies. I've seen enough classics remastered in high-def to know I don't want to see all the imperfections in props, costumes, makeup, and sets that we never used to pick up on in SD being exposed. Hell, I have several obscure movies that never received DVD reissues so there's not many other ways to view them outside of videotape.
Maybe I was just young in the 90's but as far as I can remember back in those days we weren't as obsessed with picture quality as we are now. I think the big obsession with picture quality came when DVD's came out and flat screens started showing up.
That's because standard TV resolutions hadn't changed a bit since the NTSC standards were put in place in the early '50s. It was only with the rise of digital that things started to get shaken up.
It started with the LP sized Lazer Disk. I can rem watching Star Trek (wanna say it was III) in a department store, the disk was rather beautiful, I rem hitting the Eject Button and this glorious shiny rainbow reflecting thing smoothly slid out.
That's true, because then a copy of a movie was really special. I remember when I got Toy Story as a kind. I watched it, rewinded it, and watched it again. Nowadays we are overloaded with movies throught netflix and prime
we rented moviebox (vhs unit in transportable bag with handle) and chuck norris movies. if you notice at home that the previous renter hadn't reversed the tape you would rant about it. after watching a movie me and my brother would ask who of us that got to reverse the vhs tape. we also competed with switching channels on the tv, mind you sweden had only 2 channels. the whole family watched tv and movies together.
VHS were good. They gave people the ability to record off TV and rent movies. VHS didn't have the picture of DVD, but thank goodness for VCRs in the 80s and 90s
I've already seen some people saying that there's a "flat spot" in the history of archiving broadcast TV around the end of VHS and the start of modern "Smart" formats (or just big enough hard drives to save loads of video to). I think there were DVD Recorders back in the day, but people just wanted "a DVD player" and got the cheapest one, without recording. There were hard drive based "boxes" for the likes of Sky TV, but they only had limited space and deleted old stuff automatically, also people didn't record the ads / news / other interesting bits and pieces, only shows and movies, which you can get on DVD anyway.
+Dan Livni-They sure didn't have the audio quality either. . .Or the durability. . .Over time, the more you used VHS tapes, the more you destroyed the film inside of it to where it eventually became slowly degraded. . .unusable. . .Fortunately, and through a sheer miracle, despite that we owned our own massive library of VHS tapes (which I wish we still had even today :D, I'd definitely want to hold on to them. . .), very few of our tapes ever suffered that problem. And between eight people in the entire house, our tapes were ALWAYS in heavy rotation, rewinding, fast forwarding, and rewinding all the way back to the beginning. . .Especially because we only had one major tv system throughout the entire house, and one tiny tv/vcr player in the bedroom, so every moment you could claim the vcr player for yourself was utterly indispensable. :D. The VCR players were often far more unreliable than the tapes, for us, they would often jam, or one of my nightmares, occasionally spit out the tape where the entire film was left unspooled, broken, and completely unusable. Despite all their problems and unreliability. . .I still do miss VHS players/tapes and had a hard time getting used to the emergence of DVDS. (And now I just mainly stream everything in an instant online, and pause, rewind, and fast forward with the click of a mouse. ..) Despite their problems, they were great for the time they were in. They were the absolute best we had at the time. Like every piece of technology throughout time, each new successors get far better with time. Improve from their predecessors to where probably even in the next even five years, streaming (or whatever will come after streaming and Blu ray) will become even better. The quality has vastly improved so much within the last 20 years between vhs, then dvds, then blu ray and streaming (and video recording making way to dvr, which made way to clicking with a button on your remote, to just an internet streaming feed), that I wouldn't be able to go back to using tapes. If I had to, I would use them again. It's so far ingrained in muscle memory, I definitely know how to still use them, but I really wouldn't like them as much anymore and see far more of the flaws I wasn't able to as a kid. . .But I am forever glad we had vhs as a kid. . .
To think that all these artifacts and quality imperfections are now pretty much an aesthetic in its own league is so charming, yet so weird to think of.
I guess it was inevitable, people are nostalgic for their childhood and it's a reaction against the overly crisp, digital images we're used to nowadays
You mostly notice these artifacts and imperfections on modern screens because they aren't designed to display this type of content/signal to begin with, lol. A 720p video on a 4k screen will look like crap but a 480p video on a 2k CRT will look waaaaay better and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
I still find vhs cool. I remember when I was a kid watching a movie was more like a ritual than todays routine of clicking a file or taping a screen. It was a special time
I remember the first VHS film on a machine in 1981 Superman 2 . At the time I was on rough times and still owned a B/W tv and color was nice to watch but this made me think of all the movies and tv shows I would buy when I got mine which wasnt till 1986 and that vhs machine cost $300 steep for the time . Bought it at Wards on monthly charges .
It makes sense because the MCA/Universal Home Video pressing of BTTF was from 1994, the same year Jurassic Park made its home video debut. I had that same VHS copy before I upgraded to the 2002 DVD BTTF Trilogy Pack
I used to just love smelling the inside of the clear plastic cover on the white plastic Disney movies boxes talk about a gateway drug weed has helped me cope
VHS was awesome ! We cared about content not image quality. I miss the whole ritual of going to the videostore and having friends come over to watch movies.
I agree. Hey remember when McDonalds would sell movies. I remember buying Back to the future for like 6 bucks new. I forgot what other movies were sold but I think it was a deal with Universal so they only sold movies from them.
Hello there and greetings. You guys must also be from a place we called the 90s. Where times were simpler. The world while not perfect seemed a lot more pleasant. And human beings actually interacted with each other. If you guys know how to go back there could you let me know?
My thoughts exactly! I don't recall sitting there thinking, "Oh, man, this really sucks!" while watching a VHS tape. However, something that I did notice was how easily VHS tapes and VCRs could be worn out.
Back in the 80's and even 90's when you took a tape or DVD home, you were committed to watching it, and to some extent, more grateful and attentive to the content on screen. Now we can easily abandon ship if we don't like the way a movie is going in the first 10 or 15 minutes and sometimes cheat ourselves out of a good movie without knowing it. Also, with the digital workflow being much more accessible than film to video, everyone is making movies and the market is oversaturated with poor filmmaking. Just food for thought.
While I think I see what you're saying, I don't think I can agree. I had a lot of tapes that were recorded for me, due to not having cable, and they weren't just disposable content. In fact, sometimes we would watch the same recorded show or movie over and over, and FF through parts we didn't want. It was easier than when we would copy/bootleg/share music on cassettes! But maybe I just never had a great cassette player that would give me time marks! Loved VHS back then, but wouldn't trade it for streaming and saving shows/movies today!
It's the same situation with all digitally created, and shared entertainment content now. There's an insane excess of youtube videos, podcasts, and soundcloud rappers all with Patreon accounts.
My brother had his first VHS player and we used to watch Wayne’s World over and over, the tracking used to go out so bad and we had to hit the machine to get it to work again. Great times.
The only bad memories I have about VHS are when the tape had finally gone bad. Apart from that, I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "as bad as _we_ remember".
@@robertmcmahon4549 Yes. If there's one tv show that would need to be rebooted, it's Max. They'd just have to change the tv stations into social media outlets. It would work now just as fine as it worked back then, maybe even better, with all the 80s nostalgia and dystopian cyberpunk craze going on.
As a TV broadcast engineer your presentation is quite good. Although there are some incorrect assumption which have been identified by other commentators. I would like to add that all helical tape formats including VHS have a severe timebase error. This means to record a color TV signal, some fudging must be done. Broadcast helical formats are highest quality and must use a costly (in the 1970's) digital timebase corrector to stabilize the chroma for playback. Cheaper Umatic, Betamax and VHS formats use a color under record methodology which means the luma and chroma are first separated. The luma is recorded on a conventional fm carrier and the chroma amplitude modulates the same carrier. The composite signal is reconstructed on playback. The separation of the luma and chroma is essentially S Video and may be interfaced appropriately. The S Video interface is therefore readily available on a few high end VHS machines which were used by broadcasters.
I have several SVHS decks which not only have s-video but also component outputs. These units have a TBC built in as well. These work great for capturing the old tapes directly to a hard drive using a capture card. The main drawback on the higher end decks is they only playback SP recordings.
Terry, thanks for that insight. Also, isn't it true that the professionals would having used Betacam, not pro-grade VHS tapes? I remember using pro-grade VHS for school projects, but when I interned at a local TV station (this was in 1995), it was all Betacam. Were there actually professional applications of VHS? If so, what would the rationale have been behind using them?
One of the reasons the purchased tape looks worse is because the actual tape you bought would vary in quality, EVEN IF IT WAS NEW. Why? Because of how VHS tapes were made. (This was hinted at at the 8:55 mark) They literally have a master tape play and dupe that signal to thousands of other VHS recordings. But that master tape used to make dupes only has a finite amount of plays until the signal gets progressively worse. You would then toss that 'master' tape and replace it. If one of the VHS copies you bought was near the end of the life of the master... it would be even worse. As an example, I was an absolute NUT for the Lion King when it came out in 1995. I bought it three times on VHS. Each one of those copies had varying quality played back on the same equipment. Which is what you would expect, considering that was the most duped VHS title in history for mass production.
Are you all special? Those formats (except for BetaMax) were rarely used in comparison to VHS. BetaMax could have been better quality than VHS had Sony used larger cassettes with more tape that would have allowed them to use the Beta 1 speed, but that speed was removed from most BetaMax VCRs by the early 80s. Thus, BetaMax was equal in quality (except for the ability to have somewhat better color and sharper background images) to VHS. U-Matic, another Sony format, was primarily and almost exclusively used for broadcasts. They were incredibly rare VCRs in regards to being used for home video purposes. CED, on the other hand, was unbelievably minuscule in the market, which is why it was discontinued in the mid 80s. Ask almost 99.5% or more of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and Generation X and you’ll find that they will have never even heard the word “CED”. Not to mention the fact that NONE of those formats are HD.
1. No one thought what we were watching was “bad” in real time. It was revolutionary tech. Hindsight. 2. It’s amazing that you chose this film. When I talk about certain movies I’d PREFER to watch on VHS, BTTF is at the top.
5 years is the difference between someone who is at their high school prom and someone who is a new hire at Goldman Sachs, has a Masters degree in a combined program, or a Sergeant(E-5) in the US Army or an Officer O-1!
I don't remember VHS as being bad when that's all that was available technologically at the time. If you don't have anything vastly better to compare it too then it ends up being brilliant during that time. Comparing it now, yes it was bad.
VHS was bad comparing to regular TV broadcasting. And here in Europe we had PAL format which had better resolution and didn't mess the colors like NTSC format did, so that plus a nearly crystal clear broadcast makes it a lot different than any consumer grade vhs tape. I also remember that live broadcasts were the best quality, clear as hell, because it was a direct signal from camera and not a recorded one.
regular t.v. format sucked ass back then especially if you had a crap cable company. Channels were all fuzzy and would go off and on alot. a rented VHS tape was Crystal clear compared to that
Don't forget there was a satellite option as well, and by regular TV broadcasting I meant a signal from regular antenna. By the way we still have analog broadcasting in our country and it is as clear as it was back in the day. Well, maybe a bit more clear, because the quality of cameras and storage mediums increased drastically, so basically I don't see the difference between digital and analog signal at PAL resolution at all at this point. Of course there is a difference between channels, some are really fuzzy, but main channels always had the best picture quality.
The halo around Marty's head in the "original 1985 VHS" is an epplied effect called edge enhancement. It was meant to make the picture look sharper. It probably looks better on a CRT.
I remember VHS being pretty bad, but I usually recorded in SLP mode to fit three movies onto one cassette. Years later I dubbed a DVD onto VHS in short play mode using a combo DVD/VCR unit, and the quality was far better than anything I'd ever watched on VHS in the past.
VHS machines were built like tanks when they first came out, by the time they were going out they were made incredible cheap as were the VHS cassettes. If you have old cassettes from the early 80's you'll be surprised at how heavy they are compared to cassettes from the early 2000's.
The old VCRs were heavy as they were full of individual components. Latter ones were far more integrated and therefore lighter. The older ones were not more reliable.
I do, and yes they're quite a bit heavier compared to VHS cassettes from the early 2000's. However, there are some improvements in the newer ones and I think it's safe to say they're not much worse terms of video quality, perhaps even better.
Thanks, that's a cool fact. I have about 250 VHS tapes laying around, and I noticed how some tapes are a lot heavier than others, even though their runtime is shorter. Never thought about how they developed them lighter over time.
When i was 12 years old. A whole Universe of films opened up for me to be able to watch on both Betamax and VHS, any time i wanted to. My mother worked at a video rental shop and i was also allowed to go and sit up stairs in the shop and watch all the latest releases before they were even available for customers to rent. VHS played a huge part in my childhood.
@@adventureguy4119 my mum died about 4 years ago. When i went back to attend the funeral and help clear her belongings, she still had a ton of old VHS video's stored in boxes, including a load of promotional tapes. She was watching and enjoying the tapes until the end.
@@mightymightyironhead My condolences to your family for your mother. I grew up in late 1980s Yugoslavia (born in Australia though) and I grew up on VHS as my uncle had access to bootleg tapes. I still use VHS to this day (still have three working VCRs which I keep clean by using cleaning cassettes and isopropyl alcohol cleaning fluid). Your memories with your mother are special - cherish them dearly.
As a parent now, and child from VHS days, I'm rather missing those darn things. They were so much more robust in surviving the antics of a 4yr old ruffian than dvd's and whatnot is today.
@@FrightfulAccountant Indeed, and most VHS releases in Europe were usually also completely uncut... So many DVD releases of the same movies are horribly cut or censored, even when the box says "uncut", it really isn't compared to the VHS version, especially not for horror movies. You took a wise decision in keeping the VHS collection (sadly, i was stupid enough to sell most of mine in the mid 00s, before i started to really notice how many scenes were missing from the DVD releases). Also in my opinion, nothing can beat old slashers on VHS, no matter what...the sound, even if it's supposedly worse quality, just does em so much more justice on VHS, and defects/gltiches just add to the atmosphere (same goes for the blurry picture, there's just something to it).
i’m only in my very early 20s but still grew up watching vhs tapes and started collecting them a few months ago… the quality gives me such a nostalgic feeling
Same!! I feel like I lived through the last part of the VHS era. It kinda began to die around early 2000s. But I still remember watching cartoons as a kid on them!!
Same. I was born in 1999. We still had a vhs up until 2008. I specifically remember watching The Little Mermaid and rewinding it back in the mid 2000’s.🥹
I owned one. It saved wear and tear on the much more expensive player, and worked much faster. Biggest problem with mine was it was cheap, and broke after not a huge amount of use. Another advantage was you could pop in another tape and play it immediately without waiting for the rewind to happen.
The rewinder is a must have during that time. Saves times and prolong your VCR life from mechanical failures. I've the cheap one that did not have any counter in it, so it can't be used to (re-)wind the tapes into specific 'play back time'.
I actually never had any bad memories of VHS... only good ones. On my TV I had back in the day, watching cable or a VHS had no discernible difference. Good memories of going to blockbuster or Hollywood video, being able to pop a tape in and record anything I wanted, being able to connect camcorders to and transfer it onto a full sized tape to be played anywhere... and the list goes on. I actually feel there has not been any technology in modern times that could offer that much convenience as VHS tapes.
True, but the feeling was different. See something I liked, pop a tape in and press record. Watch it later. With camcorders nowadays, sometimes people want it on bluray, DVD, or online. All of those formats require transcoding. Back then, plug the camera into the VCR, press record, and share. Do edits on dedicated equipment later if desired.
I’m guessing Nostalgia is somewhat blinding you on the past. VHS wasn’t a perfect format & the introduction of DVDs demonstrated that the public was asking more than what VHS could offer by the turn of the millennium.
You also need to consider that CRTs are fundamentally different from LCDs, so the original tapes you had were optimised for smoother displays with low colour gamuts. Also because your capture format uses interlacing, you are getting a lot of artifacts in your final results that wouldn't exist on the CRT. This video explains more: ruclips.net/video/V8BVTHxc4LM/видео.html
Not just that but the crt you have makes the difference. 20” and below are perfect for vhs. Anything above that really isn’t ideal. Another thing is cables. My vcr has svideo and component out which are lightyears ahead of composite and rf.
I still love VHS and there’s a growing community of people that dub the new movies like The Joker and John Wick onto old tapes. They even make custom card sleeves with original artwork on them. Oddly, they can get pretty expensive but a lot of work goes into making them.
You also remember the humongous(for the time) 36" CRT TV being the holy grail of entertainment. 36" and 2 billion pounds(sure felt like it) of pure, grainy entertainment.
ya the shift in technology isnt noticed when its progress forward, tv always looked presentable as it evolved, but going back in time you could see how poor it really was. as a kid i grew up on married with children for example. watching it as it aired all episodes "looked" the same. but rewatching them now you can see the quality changes over each season. i think the same applies to mono sound in tv vs stereo. the change wasnt super noticable unless you had the better equipment and watched some media of lower tech. i think we can all agree when we flipped to digital broadcast the change was so big its impossible to go back. sparking the decades of "remastered" media to make watching tolerable. i do miss snow tho. was so much easier to watch a tv show with a little static than as it is now, where any loss of signal turns into a blocky unwatchable mess.
Joe Mieszczur Well only 1920eds film reel work on the moon so NASA can,t go back 😋 but robots on Mars have such limitations so you need such robots to help you with your blocks
As child we had a guy come round every tues and fri nights in his van kitted out with vhs rentals. Jumping in the back and pick a film was brilliant and a fond memory from my childhood
@@EveryoneElseIsWeirdImNormal I'm a part of that small percentage, too! Haha we had a car-shaped rewinder. I think it's "trunk" was where we placed the tape.
Exactly. Not like we were sat there in the 80s thinking this is really terrible compared to what we’ll have in 30 years. Before tape, you couldn’t record and you had to wait 4 years to watch a film on tv. The picture was more than fine on old TVs.
Me too, it's fun getting some friends together and watching a VHS movie on an old TV. There's just something inherently fun about experiencing old tech with your friends, especially if you have some nostalgia attached.
I still record new footage to VHS for nostalgia and convenience. Sometimes I record an entire season of shows from Netflix to a single tape and watch it off the tape.
As a kid in the 80s, growing up on VHS, as bad as they were at times, getting many from Blockbuster that people didn't rewind, especially the fuzzy while recording over them over and over and using the tracking, I still miss them. I still have a few tapes in 2021. They had charm, throw them around and wouldn't get damaged unlike Blu ray. They were bulky but loved them. It's a shame they no longer are seen much and world moved on from them mostly except finding them in thrift stores, yard sales, or select places. VHS will always hold a special place in my heart.
Block Buster was awesome. Going to the store, arguing with your parents over the wildly overpriced snacks. As a kid, it was exciting seeing all those tapes on display and picking one out. There's just something about actually handling all the boxes that you don't get picking with movies on prime.
I love stuff like this but there’s a huge variable you left out: viewing them on a crt tv. Of course a low res analog source is going to look bad captured and converted to digital and put on a higher resolution display. All those edge artifacts and stuff get lessened in the scan lines of a crt. I know there’s really no way to accurately show this effect with a RUclips video but keeping the source analog all the way through yields results that aren’t as bad as this video here. It’s like how PS2 games on original hardware don’t look very good on an hdtv but are still gorgeous on a crt. Still an interesting video, I thumbs-upped :)
High definition wasn't a huge deal to your average person back then. A watchable picture was enough. I grew up with VHS in the UK. TV's and VCR's were wildly expensive in the 1980's, many people couldn't afford to buy them so rental was a boom market. Better models commanded higher rental charges, so most people just hired the cheapest available. Having a VCR was a luxury, the quality was almost irrelevant. Putting a cassette onto LP record, I don't think we even noticed the drop in quality. Renting a cassette from a video store, chances are there'd be a degree of wear and damage and we hardly cared. Pirated tapes, we'd probably laugh at the poor quality but admire the fact that we got it cheap.
That’s right! Ironically though, as often said, people remember things differently and are prone to the commercial ad tactics and some are a slave to their own emotions and painting thoughts of the past in a better light when the arguments call for it, here comes the ole; “the good ole’days” that never were THAT good at the time they were occurring. As around why people began buying their music cassettes again on Compact Discs (CDs’) and you’re likely to receive mostly an answer concerning the sound quality being better. At least that’s what people used to say was the reason. Maybe now they’d say it’s the convenience of changing tracks at the touch. /shrugs But we were basically forced to begin purchasing music on CD and music stores were basically forced to change to change to selling the CD format by the huge distribution companies and labels that more or less said to music stores; “We will no longer be excepting returns on unsold cassettes in exchange for credit. In an effort to align with the future format in the ever changing market of music and technology, we will only except returns from stores if the unsold merchandise is of Compact Disc format.” ...And that’s when you walked into the store to see that cassettes for nearly gone except for whatever is left on clearance racks. I remember that day very well.
@@michaezell4607 2004 called - they want their comment lamenting the lack of scripted programming back.... :-/ Yes - reality TV still exists but in 2018 (well 2019 now I guess) but it's been largely marginalized. By all accounts for the past 10 years we've been living in a golden age of well produced, well acted, & well written scripted television content + high quality streaming content as well from Netflix, Hulu, etc as well. If you think TV is still all reality TV garbage you've been looking in all the wrong places...
@Maurice Smith Wow - no need for ad hominems Mr Edgelord. Of course there's a lot of crap on the air (I'm looking at you TLC & Discovery Channel in particular) - there always has been - the point of my comment was to contradict his implication the programming quality during the VHS era was somehow superior. I don't know what world you're living in to discount the multitude of critically renown shows from the past 10 years. Not even including streaming services we've had: Mad Men Breaking Bad Halt and Catch Fire Walking Dead (seasons 1,3-5) The Americans Wilfred Atlanta Fargo Legion Vikings Westworld Game of Thrones Boardwalk Empire The Leftovers The Knick Shameless Dexter (seasons 1-2) The Chi Penny Dreadful Outlander True Detective (Season 1) American Gods The Expanse ...just to name a few.... But yes - I totally agree network TV sucks (excluding Bob's Burgers, Modern Family, & Blackish IMHO). All the talent & quality migrated to cable & streaming services a long time ago...
I remember the times when grandpa use to make me sit and manually rewind movies because he would say that the companies would intentionally make rewinders fast to break the film and ruin the VHS so u would have to buy more.
If you have the right equipment, they can actually look pretty good. I’m not saying that it’s great, I’m just saying that it’s not that bad. Don’t just assume that “VHS doesn’t look half bad” means “oMG VhS Is bETTer thAN 4K XD”.
It doesn't. Now, after it's been played 10,000 times, or if it's old or otherwise damaged, than it does lose it's clarity. Personally, I don't mind at all watching a 70s Clint Eastwood movie from a videotape. I like that old-school feeling. It doesn't have to be Blue-ray or even regular DVD. Why do you think people still buy and/or collect LPs or cassettes? It's Nostalgic.
They look better if you've got an old CRT to hook your VHS player up to. My old VHS copy of The Blues Brothers is older than I am, but hooked up to the 32 inch Sony Trinitron we watched TV on when our even older one (with wooden fucking panelling!) was killed by a power surge, it looks pretty good. Hook it up to the 60 inch plasma screen however, and I have to turn it off, it all depends on what equipment it's using, you've got to use equipment the format was meant to be played on.
There was actually no need for better VHS quality back then since most people were watching them on poor quality TVs. The same applies to the audio industry today, the quality has been down for 20 years since most people will listen to digitally compressed music on their earphones.
Digitally compressed reduce the quality. But most todays music isnt bad because of that. Music is not about audio quality. Back then there is high dynamic and flat equalizer from the studio which we can set it as we like using our device equalizer but todays music is mastered with super bass and low dynamic. Digitally Compressed or not if the source is worse then the result is worse.
schmidty im with you all the way there, every Friday night was horror night and we used to go to the local rental store be it Pharoes or Apollo and oder a rental, loved the choice loved the anticipation.
Nothing but love for VHS. It’s probably (well, almost definitely) nostalgia talking, but adore the watching a film on tape days. Also, recording live TV and making tapes of favourite shows was something that modern tech doesn’t capture - recording fave shows on a digital box isn’t the same as making compilation tapes.
In the old days, you could record a TV show for a friend or neighbour and give them the tape. In the late 90s I actually traded tapes with people far away - I copied and sent my rare recordings and they sent me theirs. Can't do that now - there's no easy way to get the recording off the digital TV box!
Fun fact: PAL composite's signal is far more superior when it comes to color. MUCH less coloring artifacts, more detail and can even handle teletext. (just to add up, lol) Even we've got 50 FPS, it's just better looking through composite. What's up with NTSC colors? Most of old recordings has incredibly wrong colors.
PAL has more bandwidth to store colors since it was designed after color video was introduced. NTSC had to pigeonhole the colors into to pre-existing B&W setup. It lead to a whole bunch of NTSC oddities, buy they were implemented so that everything would be backwards compatible on pre-color TV sets.
ya, i used to play the PSOne and PS2 games on CRT with Composite in early 2000's. The PAL games (especially Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec) looked much better in PAL compared to the NTSC.
The Sony trinitorn tube is not a very sharp tube. A standard inline gun tube is sharper, and a delta gun tube is the sharpest of all due to the size of the phosphor dots. You should see the quality of my old Conrac broadcast monitor. Mind you that monitor was probably 10,000 when new.
Once in a while i still use my vcr. For some reason i just love the old pixelated picture it gives off its more nostalgic than anything for me. Plus i love watching the old previews before the movie started and i love the physical feel of vhs tapes over dvds. I was using my vcr alot to watch the old Disney movies before disney + came out.
Ah man you can't beat the cosy feeling of vhs, I'm a movie fan to the grave, I got a hard drive with over 1000 films stored, plugged into my TV, all in HD with subtitles, that I can choose from and play in a second, without even getting up, but I truly don't think you can match the feeling of picking up a single case with a single film, looking at the case art, the nostalgic smell of the tape when you pop open the box, popping it in, seeing the point at which you last stopped watching the tape 10 years ago or whatever, it's so personal and nice. I think there's a lot of imperfection in perfection and that's what I find with HD, something about vhs is just unexplainable, it's real, its riddled with drawbacks, you can't have subs, pausing can be a bitch etc, but I like it, especially seeing as we live in a time where people don't even want to interact anymore. Typing became too much, now we ask alexia for weather updates and to teach our kids things that we should be teaching them, sheeeiiit, people even control their heating before they get home, and monitor their every step, it's becoming a joke, blockbuster was the best shit ever and I'll miss it too death, going out with a girl to pick a film, and awaiting watching it, making interactions with humans, it's all gone, vhs never forgets though, vhs for life motherfuckers Edit: shit, I forgot about trailers, another enticing feature of videotapes, they're humorous, they sometimes show some great films you might have never even heard of, sometimes it's an old trailer of an old film you love and it's interesting, and sometimes you just come across some hella old Dr pepper adverts that make you laugh ur ass off, the texture of vhs is really good too, it transports me back to my favourite time, not all artists work are crystal clear, and that's what I see vhs to be, you wouldn't critique basquiat for drawing abstract work, it just is what it is and some people prefer looking at things that way
Nicely said. Yes I have the same feelings about vhs... Video stores were awesome, and the cover art! Especially horror, fantasy and sci-fi films. I don't much miss the quality, with the exception that some of the old horror flicks benefit from muddy low resolution and contrast. Atmospherically there's something about grindhouse-esque grainy degrading film that made them work, especially when low grade practical effects were involved; it muddied them unlike HD video which makes the imperfections very noticeable.
blackham7 Thanks everyone I'm glad to see so many people agree! I love dvd too btw for some of the same reasons listed, but vhs is absolutely golden, I was watching a film last week called Killing Zoe off my hardrive and I had to turn it off and watch the vhs one instead, straight away I was transported back to older times, even though it wasn't wide screen and loads of the picture was cut-off, it's all worth it for the process, the sound when the tape enters the vcr it's so satisfying, it's real! And reading the case, looking at the front cover before you watch it just makes you want to watch it 10 times as much! Who remembers putting tissue or tape over to plug the hole at the bottom of a vhs tape so you could record films off TV too or doing the same with cassettes to record off the radio 😂 good times!
that vhs cant be from 1985, it had a jurassic park rebate flyer in it, which means it was probably cheaply pressed up to be sold for 5 dollars at a grocery store. the vhs tapes that were sold to video stores were higher quality tape so people could re-watch them alot, those ones usually hold up pretty good.
I think someone screwed this guy selling him a fake copy............back in the days, even I did that a lot, because I owned TWO vhs players (one was recorder) so I sold copies of weird and rare movies or guitar concerts to people.........good old days!
And don't forget that tapes deteriorates over time, because the tape itself is very sensitive to humidity and temperature, and the material it's made of worsen year by year. But even more it's the magnetic signals stored that deteriorates because of the incredible quantity of magnetic fields we're living with, and that alone is responsible for a lot of the noise.
Probably somebody already mentioned that, but this rainbow effect is only on NTSC signal, if it were PAL signal, it probably would have better contrast and no rainbow effect...
Daniel Hikkamorii that's why it was derisively nicknamed Never The Same Color. The engineers had to do a lot of trickery to get color to fit in the existing signal specification and it suffered for it. I believe the European standards (PAL/SECAM) were built from the ground up for color and thus can mix chroma and luma better than NTSC.
PAL/SECAM still use the same bandwidth which B/W and NTSC uses, but they really were designed after finding out NTSC problems and they were resolved in rather tricky way. The main signal is luminosity in all of color formats and there are two "color difference" signals. In NTSC they were coded simultaneously using "quadrature modulation" and because of radio interference they often ended mixed up. In SECAM only one color diff. signal is transmitted at time. For example, odd lines have "blue minus lum" while even lines have "red minus lum". Each TV set has ultrasonic delay line which in fact stores one of these signals, so each line have all 3 needed. That way horizontal resolution of colors is 2 times less than of luminance, but that's OK, it's the way human eye percepts them. PAL is a little more tricky, it actually uses quadrature modulation as NTSC does, but it rotates phase 180 degrees from line to line, thus its name: Phase Alternating Line! Some stupid TV sets decoded signal "on the fly", while the better ones used the same ultrasonic delay line to store previous line, so the two could be averaged and this way most of artefacts are gone, but resolution is still reduced by factor 2. Oh, the sweet times, building PAL/SECAM converters :)
Mostly correct. Both PAl and NTSC used quadrature modulation. PAL rotated the phase, and you are correct the resolution of the chroma signal is reduced. The big limiting factor on NTSC was the placement of the sound subcarrier. For years I had a big C band satellite dish, and would receive the broadcast NTSC signals (with the sound at 6.2 and 6.8MHz and the resolution was superior. I used a good monitor with a comb filter for color separation, and never saw all those bleeding colors that people with crappy cable TV did.
checkacola I tried watching Forrest Gump a few months ago on VHS and it was absolutely unbearable. The audio was barely there apart from the overbearing white noise and the picture was clearly fading.
Also we went from TV 480i to 480p to 720p to 1080i to 1080p to ultra hi def so huge leap in the past what 15yrs or so. Technology jumped lightyears over night. I blame it on Aliens 👽.
@@DH_Artist you probably have to clean your vcr, especially if it hasn't been used in a long time. Dirty heads can cause problems with the picture and sound.
LCD dispalys don't do justice to VHS. Any analog video signal looks better on CRT because the analog signal syncs with the CRT electron beam. An LCD monitor has to use a picture processor to convert the analog signal to digital RGB value/intensity/position information, which is always a rough approximation. Also, LCD displays cannot actually show lower resolutions than the fixed native resolution assigned to the LCD matrix, which nowadays is 1920X1080 and higher. LCDs are able to do that by yet again converting lower resolution to higher resolution without adding an upscaling algorithm (only possible with digital signals through at least a component connector), which adds a lot of blur to the image.
The analog signal syncs with the electron beam but to doesn't look at better on a CRT because it introduces its own artifacts and runs on its own time base so they look smeary. An LCD infers some digital process which now is vastly superior to any VHS tape we ever saw in the Eighties, even on our professional decks that had time bae correction. Those professional units were the very pinnacle of what VHS could look like and it was still horrible compared to what we mastered on our 1 inch professional video decks at that time. Even played back on the very best prosumer VHS decks (of which I own one) VHS still looked terrible, at any speed, on any quality of tape. Today the algorithms for processing video on LCD displays has professed so much that I have seen old VHS material look pretty close to an all digital DVD video played back on decent home gear today. These algorithms get better every year but VHS quality is still stuck today at where it was in the eighties, so I have carefully digitized all my old content, transferred it to my modern computer, transcoded it to h.264 (and now h.265) and despite not having a CRT, all my ancient content looks better now than ever before.
I've seen several that looked terrible and on the other hand I saw one that made the transfers better. It added noticeable noise to the picture but overall it seemed clearer so they probably just cranked up the sharpness as high as they could. I suggest trying the unit in person to make sure that it gives you reasonable results. One thing that the video professionals I knew (myself included) had in our homes were the very final generation JVC S-VHS VCRs. These units were different from all other VCRs in that their picture quality is easily heads and shoulders about all else. The story goes that JVC invented the core technology for VHS and only publicized the basic specifications to get everyone else onboard the VHS bandwagon but JVC held back a few concepts that they kept for their own professional units. Some of these improvements made their way into the last consumer units produced by JVC and even an average person who had no interest in picture quality would immediately notice just how clear these JVCs were even when playing back standard VHS (i.e. non-S-VHS tapes) tapes (both pre-recorded and homemade) tase that they would invariably as if it was a Sony Beta tase that was playing instead. These units included a Two Line Time Base Corrector, S-Video output and multiple (secret) tweaks in both recording and playback that made all the difference in the world. IIFC the model numbers were the : JVC HR-S3600U and/or the JVC HR-S9911 (you should be able to look it up). If you can find one of these units in god working order, Gove it a try and see if it helps deliver an improved picture to you. Make sure the heads are clean, I would replace all the belts and pay a professional to made sure that its tuned (timed) properly and then you should have as good a result as is possible without hiring an engineer to do it for you. Good Luck!
I was just about to come here and comment this. My VHS tapes look really good on my 26" 120Hz CRT TV but not that great on my 32" HD LCD. The LCD makes everything look a bit smeary.
I have no memory of it being bad at all. In fact, my memory is that it looked great. We always remember quality by what our impressions were of it at the time unless you're a certain comic book store owner.
First off Tigger - Used VHS didnt get repackaged in stores WITH brand new movies ads slipped into the box. No store is taking a used tape, wrapping it for resale and putting an ad in there - this literally and simply just did not happen. ALSO the Universal symbol in the corner of the vhs box was the 90's change over of the logo. The original tape HAD the original logo.
Secondly - "Back To The Future wasnt released for VHS until the 1990's" - What are you talking about???I STILL have the original release FROM 1985. VHS was KING in the 1980s and BTTF was the biggest movie of that decade - OFCOURSE it was around in the 80s. So bottom line - This tape in the video is a re-release when Jurassic Park was ALSO coming to video that year. Its not rocket science.
RUclips plus old interlaced digitally compressed is never gonna show how a real VHS is gonna look on a 28" CRT with your own eyes. It would be absolutely fine
I recently acquired a Samsung VCR/DVD-R combo that outputs at 1080i through HDMI (there's also a subsequent model that outputs at full 1080p). I'd be interested to see this comparison repeated with one of those machines. I have to say, while watching some of my old recorded broadcasts, I was shocked to find that it looked better than I remembered. It varied with the differences between SP and SLP a LOT more than I expected but overall I was surprised.
I have the 1080p version. In my opinion I think VHS looks worse over HDMI than AV. I think HDMI allows you to see more flaws in the image than AV. However, most of the tapes I have I got from thrift stores and eBay, so I'm sure they had been played quite a lot. The DVD playback is great though it does a good job at upscaling the picture.
@@porkermurns7590 You know it might be down to my display. I'm using an old Samsung plasma as my main display. One of the reasons I bought it at the time was for how well it handled standard def material. It's not perfect, of course, but the HDMI signal gets rid of the color-bleed and inherent noise from an analog RCA signal. But you still have the sub-par, almost monochromatic, color at times. And flickering.
Ehh... The fact that there was a coupon for Jurassic Park when you opened it should tell you that that particular tape was not actually manufactured in the 80’s. Sure, the movie is from 1985, but it was a popular film, and MCA probably re-released it many times on vhs. An original release from 1985 or 86 would also probably have a slightly different label on the cassette (the one in this video looks consistent with MCA labels from the 90’s, not 80’s). Those early vhs tapes from the very first companies who pioneered the format used very high quality tape stock, very heavy plastic, just all around better quality. And believe it or not, its the oldest vhs tapes that will last the longest, they were the highest quality. Tapes manufactured in the 90’s (especially after dvd came out) and early 00’s especially were made on low quality tape stock and used probably cheaper transfer methods etc., and i find its those newer cheap featherlight tapes that are more susceptible to being eaten by a vcr odd enough. Just keep vhs tapes out of heat and away from moisture and they will last a very long time.
I would tend to agree with you here. I also wonder just how much vhs tape was type 1 and/or type 2 as they used in making cassette tapes so that comes to mind for me in how different brands made the vhs tapes for variants in their tape.
For a long time movies were way too expensive to buy on VHS. They were something like 60 or 80 bucks each. Eventually prices came down so low that McDonald’s was selling millions of vhs tapes with happy meals.
@@jacobbellwood6184 VHS tapes are more similar to type II audio cassettes than type I. They are also much higher quality than audio cassettes, as the video signal is much more complicated and requires much higher quality reproduction to meet the bare minimum if quality to display as a video without garbled colors and skipped frames.
You are right, as a Kid of the 80s we only owned 3 movies, we rented everything and the rest were blank casettes we used to tape TV shows over and over...but in the 1990 we got many movies from McDonald(back to the future was one of them).
I bought the most expensive Super VHS player I could find hoping it would play my normal VHS collection better. I was pretty pissed when the VHS machine I bought at the Thrift Store played much better then the fancy Super VHS I bought off eBay for $400. Thankfully I was able to send it back to the seller for a refund.
Marty Moose A 4-head player is recommended if you’re trying to play old tapes. Actually get one with a DVD burned and start copying your tapes before they degrade further.
@@johnnycorona8851 My thrift store VCR I poke fun of it but it's actually really nice. 4 heads and that dial to super ff is pretty cool. When I was on my obsession with getting the possible picture I also found a 5 head VCR but it wasn't as good as my other one for picture quality. I was surprised when he said 4 head doesn't make a better picture. Maybe not on a raw feed to his capture device but on my CRT TV it was much better. 2 head VCR's always had visible horizontal lines on the CRT but not with any 4 head I've used.
encycl07pedia This dumbass (and actually everyone I know!) First, a big portion of my dvds were purchased before I knew ripping them was a thing. So, is it worth it? Is the software free or paid? Wouldnt you have to buy storage for the files? I just feel like I don't understand the point, I've never had anything happen to any of my discs so it seems like a lot of time and money with no payoff?
JVC SVHS vcrs have S-Video output. Also, in broadcasting class in high school, they had an old Panasonic SVHS professional VCR with both BNC and S-Video outputs.
That didn't help much, because the actual signal recorded on VHS was composite. I never owned a VHS VCR. Before digital video, I used Hi8. Much smaller cassette, way better quality. It actually recorded Y and C separately.
The BNC connectors were likely the separate Y/C channels. Depending on what you were doing. For example, the high school I had, had a Video Toaster that used the BNC as well, but the BNC connectors were just composite video. It just offered shielding, and the cables were 75ohm coax. You can find BNC Y/C to S-Video connectors online. In general, the video is right, but the testing methodology is flawed since he used a first generation master video source that was higher resolution than the recorder. If he had used a S-VHS deck and connected it with S-Video connectors, but still used the same tape, the results would have had less chroma-bleed, but the resolution would have been exactly the same. All S-Video does is separate the Chroma and Luma, and it wasn't until YPBPR (when DVD players came out) that it was possible to get "perfect" analog transfers if the cables are high quality to not induce dot crawl (which is why the "squares" appear, that's dot crawl, improper multiplexing.)
I was watching Wonder Woman for work (my job is pretty decent, I must admit) on Netflix, and just as it got to the first battle scene, the quality went potato for some reason. VHS might not have been HD, but at least it was consistent!
@@michaelmartin9022 this video is comparing physical media formats. Streams will always be lower quality than a physical copy. You shouldn't be expecting high quality from streaming services. It's simply unrealistic. Also, the quality on streams is usually dictated by your connection.
@@xjunkxyrdxdog89 you're lucky, then. Many have the same problem. No, it's not due to scratches. These are new, first watch, flawless appearance disks. Don't be ignorant. The publisher burn factories encode & burn too fast and errors are introduced in the bitstream. Data for DVD and bluray are compressed, highly. On audio CDs it's just like a .wav file or raw waveform audio except in plastic pits instead of vinyl grooves like old records. Very little compression, just a little off the top and bottom frequencies. That's why audio almost never had manufacturing defects & skips. You could have a few errors in the burn but almost no noticeable effect on the bitstream. Not so with DVD or blue ray. Smaller pits, more compression, more data lost if a write error happened, which they do, a lot, and the players can't figure out what to read after they hit the error.
@@xjunkxyrdxdog89 wrong, streams can be 4k lossless if you have enough bandwidth. HD streams take ~6mbps. 4k streams use 15mbps. If you put a 4k bluray disk in a player, pipe it to your home network, then watch that remotely in your own homemade "stream", it's the exact same - you just need proper bandwidth.
Another great albeit old episode! Consistently well done. One thing to add ... This ignored "interlacing" and "upper and lower fields". Adobe's Google search is a good answer. In summary, low bandwidth video sent to old analog TVs worked well by interlacing and cutting up the video in horizontal strips called upper and lower fields. Like interlacing your fingers together. Old TVs cannot show NON-interlaced video. *New TVs can. That means old video looks better on new TVs largely due to the lack of fields. Fields are in Render Settings and must be changed to see the difference. If a video already has fields, it's permanent. Gotta have a good source. All the major artifacts in this video are from the fields. When you watched the footage on the TV, it wasn't as good as your ripped version seen on the computer monitor. Old TV vs "new" Monitor. Hope this helps. Surely many people have already said this, but this only helps the Channel. ❤
![Quando Rondo - Grow Up [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/8zFnCg3BO4Q/mqdefault.jpg)
The thing is, it wasn’t bad quality… just seems it now because we have the tech that we do. No way in ‘87 would I have said “I can’t watch this, quality is terrible”
We've gotten spoiled haven't we
@@shinyhorse8045 Im 42 and yes..spoiled to the core but when you watched vhs tapes in very bad condition even for.. mm 1990 i remember that i started to curse a lot.. jajaaa.
I know... As if.
@SlowHandMcQueeg I'm 41, my grandparents at that time had some beta tape and no it wasn't soooooooooooo much better, it was just slightly better but not by much, I remember. If I'm not mistaken 8-bit guy has a comparison vid between vhs and beta on his channel and pretty much confirms my argument and drills your into the ground. So stfu with hyperbolic BS.
I grew up in the 70s watching hockey on a 13" B&W T.V. with rabbit ears. Now I can't change the channel fast enough if I end up on a non-HD channel by mistake on my 65" 4K. Like you said, we accept what we have.
In the classroom in elementary school we didnt care about quality. We only cared if we were going to do a free day of nothing
lol - so true!
Unfortunately for me, the teachers always played crap like Barney which the rest of my class seemed to enjoy. All I could do is sit there and think, "What the hell is wrong with you people." I also use to get in trouble for not wanting to watch Barney or take naps with the rest of the class.
I think kids still dont care. They just wanna see movies or bill nye in class
While giggling with your best buddy and making fun of virtually anything , which would eventually get you in trouble.
Amen.
We didn't know any better. It was fun as hell going to the rental store.
And finding that your movie was not there.
I completely agree ! It was so fun going to the rental store for VHS and video games! I was too young back then to go in the adult section lol.
Straight to the horror section! ;)
unless the person before you failed to rewind it
@@wannabeetiger i wish i could go back to those days again, back when there was no internet, wi-fi, Instagram and iphones
I miss the whole VHS "process." The whole "be kind rewind" at rental stores, the large plastic case(including the snapping sound), buying blank ones to record, forgetting to snap off the tab and recording over a favorite event.
Squeezing the vhs out of the box with the blockbuster plastic on it is the best feeling in the world
I loved recording over favourite content. 😎
Did you ever record over rented movies? 😆 I never did, but it was tempting.
Ahhh the good ole days. I understand jeff. As my buddy told me once: it's not the convenience that we miss necessarily... it's the nastalgia .
My man!
Not once did I ever think that vhs was bad growing up. When dvds came out I was only excited about the amount of space on the shelf they would save and not the boost in quality.
@Ken Lompart They actually did have DVD recorders, but I don't think they were too common.
I loved DVDs because I was (and still am) a film nerd and the directors commentary blew me away. I loved hearing the filmmakers and actors talk about the film
@@SpongeSebastian They did but were expensive and needed a writable DVD which were also expensive, they gradually became common and cheaper but we were moving onto sd cards and usbs.
The only reason I don't still use VHS is because when our old TV broke (it was one that had the player built in) my Dad threw out all our old tapes.
True VHS takes up a lot of space but it’s still better than collecting DVDs.
Kids these days will never know the pain of having to rewind a movie, because the last person was too lazy.
be kind, rewind!
superplough We didn't have this saying in Australia. We had "Don't be an a#$hole, rewind"
GOOD. That means I'll never have to experience that again either! It sucked.
Kano Animation We didnt have a saying, we had to pay for a "rewind service". We are Dutch, after all.
omg yes that was so frustrating !!!!
VHS didn't freeze or skip, and you could fast forward through the FBI warnings.
Try usenet no fbi warnings no commercials.
You had to manually rewind it every time. There were so many limitations to VHS-don't kid yourself into thinking it was any good.
A simpler time
OldClam5 VHS was a pain with all the rewinding and so on I admit. But there were many movies out on video that have yet to be released on dvd, or versions that have been released but have had scenes edited out. So unless you’ve kept a version of the movie on Video of which you can get transferred to a dvd, it could be hard work trying to find a version, or an original version of what you’re looking for.
lol, you guys are just lazy. When I was a kid I would let it rewind and choose the next movie to watch to pass the time.
That sound of open the case with the cassett inside sparked so many memories. I haven't heard that sound in over 20 years
Yep 👍 Know what you mean
I still have many VHS tapes and quite a few of the plastic cases. Since I store my tapes in boxes but love the cases, I use the cases as storage boxes.
I can make that sound any time I want... Beautiful sound for VHS fans.
A friend and I have VHS Sundays. He's a collector of VHS so I still get to have that Blockbuster experience of walking about and picking a film lol
@Jeric White huh?
Good old days, renting VHS movies based on the covers 😂
@@danimcfly5992 haha yeah!! Luckily though for me I've got my mate lol he's obviously not got a full shops worth but one of his livingroom walls is just VHS and it's a big room! So many I have never even heard of!
Is it the Nerd?
@@mr.berardine1694 lol sadly not
People in 2030: DVDs - Were they as bad as we remember?
May those unskippable intros, "piracy bad"-clips and overly animated menus rest in hell.
In 2030 we will have holodecks. We'll be part of the movie. You will actually be able to experience the hoverboard from BTTF2.
It will be 2080 and I'll probably still have my VHS tape collection if every single one of them manages to stay intact and not get destroyed in some kind of flooding or house fire.
Netflix: Was as bad as we remember?
Yeah, just give it some more time & we'll be nostalgic for dvds & Blu-rays, once they're obsolete. I know i'm gonna hold onto mine. I will never accept streaming. I want a physical copy of a movie or tv show, to own.
Considering we used to watch on such small screens, the quality was fine. I miss the VHS, it was so cooler than opening the netflix app.
Corona virus would have spread faster back then.
Hmm... 🤔 I'll keep my Netflix. 😂
Oh really?
Television screens are a series of dots like pixels watching a VHS tape on say a 14'' the picture quality was reasonable but change it to a big tv say a 25--29'' then you will notice the difference, do not sit to close it looks ok but get in close the picture quality is not as good, i am not sure if the dots ( sorry i can remember the correct name ) varied between say a cheap tv and a higher quality tv.
I don't like streaming services, so luckily i don't have to experience opening the netflix app. I do enjoy popping in a BD though, retains part of the VHS era. ^^
They were never that bad, they just got outdated. Everything for the time was literally the best until the next best thing comes along then we get spoilt by it.
Streaming isn't higher quality that DVD/Blu-Ray/4K.
@@scottandrewhutchins Streaming is MUCH higher quality than DVD, what are you streaming 480p?
@@BatmanisBatman Most streaming sources don't have the lossless sound quality of BD (e.g. DTS MA); eventually this may change.
LCD screens were better only on resolution and size/weight against CRTs, everything else (color, contrast, brightness, viewing angle, response time) got much worse and things are only catching up now
DVD was not clearly best: lines horizontal lines than VHS and first generation of videos were not that good.
Be kind rewind!!
& If you don’t it’s a $1.00 rewind fee!
YEP!
I had a dedicated rewinding machine!
$.50 in my area.
More like a fine.
My local movie store had to stop charging because literally nobody rewinded the movies. I did, because I'm not a fucking lazy twat. But most people around here just didn't bother. It always sucked when I used to rent a movie and had the rewind the damn thing.
I still use my VCR and collect VHS tapes when I find them, so it's still loved and used here.
Same here
Both my kids are growing up with VHS
Thats fine , tape what you like . The only thing is the resolution sucks . Colors bleed with technology tv that we have . I had in the early 2000 a DvD recorder that used blank discs the same way as tapes but you couldn't tape over them . I used to reuse the spool to hold all the discs that had 2 - 3 movies on each one . You can find old machines and I know where one is that Im willing to swap with the owner since they only use it to watch movies.
just started collecting myself. as part of growing up in the 90s / 2000s, Family never had $ to rent @ blockbuster so now I have over 100 titles & play them everyday every hour once i'm home.
@@andrewyi4477 I might have driven a couple family members crazy by playing old Leslie Nielsen movies over and over for days on end..
It’s not really the quality being bad, it’s how my VCR would eat a tape. If you’ve never had your tape player EAT a tape, then you are fortunate
Happened to a very dear recording from 2003 here. It frazzled a good 10 seconds of it - I thankfully was able to save the rest. Cause: a plastic pillar that had come loose and decided it wouldn’t catch onto the tape. Instead of just rejecting it, the tape was already out, fully exposed and it got caught in the rest of the mechanism as it ejected. So much fun. I took for granted that it would happen eventually. Got a new machine, top of the bill late 2007 build, and have been happy since 👍 as for the precious tape: it comes out at special occasions only 😂
@@noslost-z7r It might be a worthy investment to have it transferred and copied onto a DVD. You can still keep the tape.
I had a cheep player from 1989 for over 10 years and it never damaged a tape
That’s cause you were a poor. Just make more money. Duh
yep
As a kid in the 80s just the fact that I could watch cartoons when they weren’t being broadcast on tv was a big thing. We didn’t care about picture quality, because most tvs were the same (the big fuss was if your friend’s folks had a big tv, which in those days might have had a screen somewhere in the mid 20 inches!). I have a handful of VHS for nostalgia but for me the leap to DVD was phenomenal. The picture was massively better, no rewinding, able to skip to any part of the film and all the extras! Sure, the piracy ads were a pain but you just did something else whilst they were on (and with how slow Blu ray can be it was preferable). I have found a lot of those ads can be skipped or fast forwarded anyway.
Screen have a lot to do with it, a small CRT across the room is miles away from massive 40+ inch LCD or a modern disk top monitor in terms of display.
Piracy advertisement?
@@DinoNuggies4665 They mean the FBI warnings about piracy before the movie.
VHS was much better for cartoons anyway, they look just fine, the picture quality only really starts to look bad with live action, and even that's only because we're now playing these tapes on flat screens 5 times bigger than anything they were designed to be played on
you guys are probably native english speakers so maybe did not care so much. But another great advantage of DVDs was being able to choose your audio language and subtitle tracks, which is a big leap as well if you live in a country with systematic and not always nice audio dubbing.
Looking back, VHS does look bad. But only because we are now use to better video. VHS was about the best we had for home use at the time. It is nice to have lived long enough to do the comparison.
There were the odd enthusiasts that were into Laserdiscs at the time. I knew no one personally that had any but my high school music teacher had a Laserdisc player for the classroom upon which we watched West Side Story. That always struck me as hilarious, not only having a machine that not a lot of people own but also a movie that not lot of those people would probably buy for it. :)
I had a laserdisc player with about a dozen or so movies, and they did have a somewhat higher video quality than VHS, plus CD-quality digital sound. The biggest selling point for me at the time was that they tended to be letterboxed, showing the full width of the movie, while VHS versions tended to use the severely cropped "pan & scan" format. Eventually, DVDs hit the scene, which had a slightly higher quality than the analog-video laserdisc.
Beta had better quality than VHS, Beta only lost because of its shorter duration tapes.
Oh, and Laser Disk had the best quality for home use at the time.
I have some Laserdiscs now but they're more for just novelty. I only paid a couple bucks for each, two of them being Ghostbusters I & II. :)
The overwhelming majority of my video collection is VHS and I'm perfectly okay with that. I'm not all that hung up on picture quality when it comes to old movies. I've seen enough classics remastered in high-def to know I don't want to see all the imperfections in props, costumes, makeup, and sets that we never used to pick up on in SD being exposed.
Hell, I have several obscure movies that never received DVD reissues so there's not many other ways to view them outside of videotape.
Bad Blu-ray Disc, also 4K, is very fuck and is dead.
Maybe I was just young in the 90's but as far as I can remember back in those days we weren't as obsessed with picture quality as we are now. I think the big obsession with picture quality came when DVD's came out and flat screens started showing up.
That's because standard TV resolutions hadn't changed a bit since the NTSC standards were put in place in the early '50s. It was only with the rise of digital that things started to get shaken up.
LaserDisc was better, however the players cost too much for most people and very few places rented discs.
Some people certainly were, there is a reason Criterion Collection sold 100+ dollar laserdiscs.
Smoky Doggg Well the focus was just getting a copy of the movie. Even crappy tape copies would do.
It started with the LP sized Lazer Disk.
I can rem watching Star Trek (wanna say it was III) in a department store, the disk was rather beautiful, I rem hitting the Eject Button and this glorious shiny rainbow reflecting thing smoothly slid out.
What a remember was hours in video stores trying to pick a couple of films for that night, that was part of the fun
i hated it and now it takes even longer since there are so many more options streaming.
Yep, and getting 1 or 2 NES games while I was there. Lots of fun.
@@zipzip8239 Meditate. Get fresh air. Listen to birds.
@@BabeTheAstrologer why?
@Coo Chi its not about being lazy, its about wasting my life trying to decide what to watch.
Man I miss less efficient, lower quality, less perfect tech. Makes things much more fun
I love seeing movies in HD but I had more fun watching movies in the VHS days.
That's true, because then a copy of a movie was really special. I remember when I got Toy Story as a kind. I watched it, rewinded it, and watched it again. Nowadays we are overloaded with movies throught netflix and prime
we rented moviebox (vhs unit in transportable bag with handle) and chuck norris movies. if you notice at home that the previous renter hadn't reversed the tape you would rant about it. after watching a movie me and my brother would ask who of us that got to reverse the vhs tape. we also competed with switching channels on the tv, mind you sweden had only 2 channels. the whole family watched tv and movies together.
Not necessarily, Michi, because we can get the physical copies in HD on Blu-ray Disc.
I remember watching Gremlins on my '98 tv set
A lot of that has to do just with younger age. Everything just seemed more fun :)
VHS were good. They gave people the ability to record off TV and rent movies.
VHS didn't have the picture of DVD, but thank goodness for VCRs in the 80s and 90s
when life was simple
I've already seen some people saying that there's a "flat spot" in the history of archiving broadcast TV around the end of VHS and the start of modern "Smart" formats (or just big enough hard drives to save loads of video to). I think there were DVD Recorders back in the day, but people just wanted "a DVD player" and got the cheapest one, without recording. There were hard drive based "boxes" for the likes of Sky TV, but they only had limited space and deleted old stuff automatically, also people didn't record the ads / news / other interesting bits and pieces, only shows and movies, which you can get on DVD anyway.
@@michaelmartin9022 not all history is worth saving. I think we'll all get by without spacejam and Clinton trial commercials.
NO .. People were NOT recording Off of a TV .. They were recording OFF AIR
Stop it with that nonsense.
+Dan Livni-They sure didn't have the audio quality either. . .Or the durability. . .Over time, the more you used VHS tapes, the more you destroyed the film inside of it to where it eventually became slowly degraded. . .unusable. . .Fortunately, and through a sheer miracle, despite that we owned our own massive library of VHS tapes (which I wish we still had even today :D, I'd definitely want to hold on to them. . .), very few of our tapes ever suffered that problem. And between eight people in the entire house, our tapes were ALWAYS in heavy rotation, rewinding, fast forwarding, and rewinding all the way back to the beginning. . .Especially because we only had one major tv system throughout the entire house, and one tiny tv/vcr player in the bedroom, so every moment you could claim the vcr player for yourself was utterly indispensable. :D. The VCR players were often far more unreliable than the tapes, for us, they would often jam, or one of my nightmares, occasionally spit out the tape where the entire film was left unspooled, broken, and completely unusable.
Despite all their problems and unreliability. . .I still do miss VHS players/tapes and had a hard time getting used to the emergence of DVDS. (And now I just mainly stream everything in an instant online, and pause, rewind, and fast forward with the click of a mouse. ..) Despite their problems, they were great for the time they were in. They were the absolute best we had at the time. Like every piece of technology throughout time, each new successors get far better with time. Improve from their predecessors to where probably even in the next even five years, streaming (or whatever will come after streaming and Blu ray) will become even better. The quality has vastly improved so much within the last 20 years between vhs, then dvds, then blu ray and streaming (and video recording making way to dvr, which made way to clicking with a button on your remote, to just an internet streaming feed), that I wouldn't be able to go back to using tapes. If I had to, I would use them again. It's so far ingrained in muscle memory, I definitely know how to still use them, but I really wouldn't like them as much anymore and see far more of the flaws I wasn't able to as a kid. . .But I am forever glad we had vhs as a kid. . .
I don't remember VHS tapes as being bad. They suited me just fine.
Thats cause TVa were also bad . And let's be honest you didn't know what 4k was yet . You didn't actually see anything better until years later .
@Coo Chi lots of people care... hence the market for 4k tvs....
@Coo Chi oh dear... you have an extra chromosome don't you? You poor thing .
@Coo Chi You said something stupid I'm gonna tell you you said something stupid lol. Do you even know where you are right now ?
@@silvafox07
TVs were indeed bad back then. They were bulky and weighed as much as a bag of bricks.
To think that all these artifacts and quality imperfections are now pretty much an aesthetic in its own league is so charming, yet so weird to think of.
I guess it was inevitable, people are nostalgic for their childhood and it's a reaction against the overly crisp, digital images we're used to nowadays
@@rorz999 it proves once again that more, isn't necessarily better
You mostly notice these artifacts and imperfections on modern screens because they aren't designed to display this type of content/signal to begin with, lol. A 720p video on a 4k screen will look like crap but a 480p video on a 2k CRT will look waaaaay better and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
I still find vhs cool. I remember when I was a kid watching a movie was more like a ritual than todays routine of clicking a file or taping a screen. It was a special time
Well you won't ever get to use VHS again anytime soon
@@stephensnell1379 except if they get their hands on a VHS player (which are pretty cheap nowadays)
What move title
I remember the first VHS film on a machine in 1981 Superman 2 . At the time I was on rough times and still owned a B/W tv and color was nice to watch but this made me think of all the movies and tv shows I would buy when I got mine which wasnt till 1986 and that vhs machine cost $300 steep for the time . Bought it at Wards on monthly charges .
Mk Amen
A 1985 VHS with a flyer for a 1993 movie in the package? Well, I suppose it is about time travel...
It makes sense because the MCA/Universal Home Video pressing of BTTF was from 1994, the same year Jurassic Park made its home video debut. I had that same VHS copy before I upgraded to the 2002 DVD BTTF Trilogy Pack
stoopidmonkeyful - You didn't get it...did you?
Olly Dean in the 1940s there where no vcr players
What? That has nothing to do with anything discussed here.
Ridj some of the Looney tunes VHS tapes are not cheap on eBay
Back when switching to DVD's, I joked asking my wife if she rewound the DVD... she dang near did it the first time.
"Rewound" is not a word.
@@111highgh always someone tryin to be a RUclips spell cop. 😂
@Mr. A I'm not even going to acknowledge your existence.
So add it in the dictionary
Hold this L...
and sit on it. _I just gave you a chair, have fun._
I actually kinda like the VHS look;
it has a sort of warm and smooth look.
Me too. I was not impressed with the whole DVD transition
Me too! It has that feel that DVD can't reproduce.
Me too, I like the old VHS quality.
They really could go the way of records, going by these comments!
@@le_plane I never liked DVD, it just felt worse. Bluray is what changed the game.
2:32 Who else felt the "new VHS cassette" smell watching this?
Still burned into my head
I couldn't smell anything because of my tears
Krzysztof Czarnecki Me!
I used to just love smelling the inside of the clear plastic cover on the white plastic Disney movies boxes talk about a gateway drug weed has helped me cope
Too young to remember the “new cassette smell”
VHS was awesome ! We cared about content not image quality.
I miss the whole ritual of going to the videostore and having friends come over to watch movies.
I agree. Hey remember when McDonalds would sell movies. I remember buying Back to the future for like 6 bucks new. I forgot what other movies were sold but I think it was a deal with Universal so they only sold movies from them.
I don't think we stopped caring about this.
Hello there and greetings. You guys must also be from a place we called the 90s. Where times were simpler. The world while not perfect seemed a lot more pleasant. And human beings actually interacted with each other. If you guys know how to go back there could you let me know?
@@TombstoneChris You just interacted with two guys you don't even know. Not bad these modern days.
ChrisS82 if you just watch the video, there is a movie shown that will help get you back to the 90s if you go 88 mph.
The thing is though...VHS was all we knew back then...it didn't bother us because we had nothing better to compare it with!
actually beta was better however way too expensive for consumers
@@mctv6486 Beta was indeed better, but vhs' aggressive marketing paid off
Laserdisc was a thing
Beta had better picture quality, but VHS blank cassettes had longer recording time, which was the seller for VHS....also porn went with VHS
My thoughts exactly! I don't recall sitting there thinking, "Oh, man, this really sucks!" while watching a VHS tape. However, something that I did notice was how easily VHS tapes and VCRs could be worn out.
They weren't bad at all. In fact, I got way more excited to see a movie I like on tape than I do today loading a Netflix.
Back in the 80's and even 90's when you took a tape or DVD home, you were committed to watching it, and to some extent, more grateful and attentive to the content on screen. Now we can easily abandon ship if we don't like the way a movie is going in the first 10 or 15 minutes and sometimes cheat ourselves out of a good movie without knowing it. Also, with the digital workflow being much more accessible than film to video, everyone is making movies and the market is oversaturated with poor filmmaking. Just food for thought.
Yes, there are many movies now made ... and you wonder why?
While I think I see what you're saying, I don't think I can agree. I had a lot of tapes that were recorded for me, due to not having cable, and they weren't just disposable content. In fact, sometimes we would watch the same recorded show or movie over and over, and FF through parts we didn't want.
It was easier than when we would copy/bootleg/share music on cassettes! But maybe I just never had a great cassette player that would give me time marks!
Loved VHS back then, but wouldn't trade it for streaming and saving shows/movies today!
Oh I dunno, I remember bailing on some rented movies back in the day which were terrible.
I somewhat agree. At least on the premise that there are too many garbage movies these days.
It's the same situation with all digitally created, and shared entertainment content now. There's an insane excess of youtube videos, podcasts, and soundcloud rappers all with Patreon accounts.
My brother had his first VHS player and we used to watch Wayne’s World over and over, the tracking used to go out so bad and we had to hit the machine to get it to work again. Great times.
Party time, excellent!
The only bad memories I have about VHS are when the tape had finally gone bad.
Apart from that, I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "as bad as _we_ remember".
All I remember is how bad every news broadcaster looked when they upgraded to HD quality, that much is for sure.
Cool pic,max headroom brings back memories
@@robertmcmahon4549 Yes.
If there's one tv show that would need to be rebooted, it's Max.
They'd just have to change the tv stations into social media outlets. It would work now just as fine as it worked back then, maybe even better, with all the 80s nostalgia and dystopian cyberpunk craze going on.
@@ShootAUT yeh i watched him recently and it doesnt look like its aged
@@robertmcmahon4549 Exactly.
The quality of the videos didn’t have to be that good, since the quality of the TVs were on par.
As a TV broadcast engineer your presentation is quite good. Although there are some incorrect assumption which have been identified by other commentators. I would like to add that all helical tape formats including VHS have a severe timebase error. This means to record a color TV signal, some fudging must be done. Broadcast helical formats are highest quality and must use a costly (in the 1970's) digital timebase corrector to stabilize the chroma for playback. Cheaper Umatic, Betamax and VHS formats use a color under record methodology which means the luma and chroma are first separated. The luma is recorded on a conventional fm carrier and the chroma amplitude modulates the same carrier. The composite signal is reconstructed on playback. The separation of the luma and chroma is essentially S Video and may be interfaced appropriately. The S Video interface is therefore readily available on a few high end VHS machines which were used by broadcasters.
I have several SVHS decks which not only have s-video but also component outputs. These units have a TBC built in as well. These work great for capturing the old tapes directly to a hard drive using a capture card. The main drawback on the higher end decks is they only playback SP recordings.
Terry, thanks for that insight. Also, isn't it true that the professionals would having used Betacam, not pro-grade VHS tapes? I remember using pro-grade VHS for school projects, but when I interned at a local TV station (this was in 1995), it was all Betacam. Were there actually professional applications of VHS? If so, what would the rationale have been behind using them?
One of the reasons the purchased tape looks worse is because the actual tape you bought would vary in quality, EVEN IF IT WAS NEW. Why? Because of how VHS tapes were made. (This was hinted at at the 8:55 mark) They literally have a master tape play and dupe that signal to thousands of other VHS recordings. But that master tape used to make dupes only has a finite amount of plays until the signal gets progressively worse. You would then toss that 'master' tape and replace it. If one of the VHS copies you bought was near the end of the life of the master... it would be even worse. As an example, I was an absolute NUT for the Lion King when it came out in 1995. I bought it three times on VHS. Each one of those copies had varying quality played back on the same equipment. Which is what you would expect, considering that was the most duped VHS title in history for mass production.
They were also high speed duped.
VHS was fine! we didn't have anything HD to compare it to.
Capacitance Electronic Disk
Unless you saw the movie in theaters.
Exactly
Are you all special? Those formats (except for BetaMax) were rarely used in comparison to VHS. BetaMax could have been better quality than VHS had Sony used larger cassettes with more tape that would have allowed them to use the Beta 1 speed, but that speed was removed from most BetaMax VCRs by the early 80s. Thus, BetaMax was equal in quality (except for the ability to have somewhat better color and sharper background images) to VHS. U-Matic, another Sony format, was primarily and almost exclusively used for broadcasts. They were incredibly rare VCRs in regards to being used for home video purposes. CED, on the other hand, was unbelievably minuscule in the market, which is why it was discontinued in the mid 80s. Ask almost 99.5% or more of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and Generation X and you’ll find that they will have never even heard the word “CED”. Not to mention the fact that NONE of those formats are HD.
Ben Jones I’ve been recording to VHS recently and it’s not even that bad.
1. No one thought what we were watching was “bad” in real time. It was revolutionary tech. Hindsight.
2. It’s amazing that you chose this film. When I talk about certain movies I’d PREFER to watch on VHS, BTTF is at the top.
It was always a little worse than TV.
“This is me in 87”, “this is me in ‘92” puberty hit like a rock
Well 5 years in teenage years is a LOT
5 years is the difference between someone who is at their high school prom and someone who is a new hire at Goldman Sachs, has a Masters degree in a combined program, or a Sergeant(E-5) in the US Army or an Officer O-1!
87 - child
92 - full grown adult
😂
I don't remember VHS as being bad when that's all that was available technologically at the time. If you don't have anything vastly better to compare it too then it ends up being brilliant during that time.
Comparing it now, yes it was bad.
VHS was bad comparing to regular TV broadcasting. And here in Europe we had PAL format which had better resolution and didn't mess the colors like NTSC format did, so that plus a nearly crystal clear broadcast makes it a lot different than any consumer grade vhs tape. I also remember that live broadcasts were the best quality, clear as hell, because it was a direct signal from camera and not a recorded one.
regular t.v. format sucked ass back then especially if you had a crap cable company. Channels were all fuzzy and would go off and on alot. a rented VHS tape was Crystal clear compared to that
Don't forget there was a satellite option as well, and by regular TV broadcasting I meant a signal from regular antenna. By the way we still have analog broadcasting in our country and it is as clear as it was back in the day. Well, maybe a bit more clear, because the quality of cameras and storage mediums increased drastically, so basically I don't see the difference between digital and analog signal at PAL resolution at all at this point. Of course there is a difference between channels, some are really fuzzy, but main channels always had the best picture quality.
Perihelion74 - Agreed! Same applies for the video game industry.
Imagine what you will think of todays tech 30 years from now.
The halo around Marty's head in the "original 1985 VHS" is an epplied effect called edge enhancement. It was meant to make the picture look sharper. It probably looks better on a CRT.
I remember VHS being pretty bad, but I usually recorded in SLP mode to fit three movies onto one cassette. Years later I dubbed a DVD onto VHS in short play mode using a combo DVD/VCR unit, and the quality was far better than anything I'd ever watched on VHS in the past.
VHS machines were built like tanks when they first came out, by the time they were going out they were made incredible cheap as were the VHS cassettes. If you have old cassettes from the early 80's you'll be surprised at how heavy they are compared to cassettes from the early 2000's.
Michael Davidson I have a portable vcr player
The old VCRs were heavy as they were full of individual components. Latter ones were far more integrated and therefore lighter. The older ones were not more reliable.
I do, and yes they're quite a bit heavier compared to VHS cassettes from the early 2000's. However, there are some improvements in the newer ones and I think it's safe to say they're not much worse terms of video quality, perhaps even better.
Michael Davidson I have a portable vcr player
Thanks, that's a cool fact. I have about 250 VHS tapes laying around, and I noticed how some tapes are a lot heavier than others, even though their runtime is shorter. Never thought about how they developed them lighter over time.
No they were the best thing to ever happen in my life as a child.
When i was 12 years old. A whole Universe of films opened up for me to be able to watch on both Betamax and VHS, any time i wanted to. My mother worked at a video rental shop and i was also allowed to go and sit up stairs in the shop and watch all the latest releases before they were even available for customers to rent. VHS played a huge part in my childhood.
You're so lucky mate
@@futuresocieties. golden days mate.
What happened to your mum?
@@adventureguy4119 my mum died about 4 years ago. When i went back to attend the funeral and help clear her belongings, she still had a ton of old VHS video's stored in boxes, including a load of promotional tapes. She was watching and enjoying the tapes until the end.
@@mightymightyironhead My condolences to your family for your mother. I grew up in late 1980s Yugoslavia (born in Australia though) and I grew up on VHS as my uncle had access to bootleg tapes. I still use VHS to this day (still have three working VCRs which I keep clean by using cleaning cassettes and isopropyl alcohol cleaning fluid). Your memories with your mother are special - cherish them dearly.
As a parent now, and child from VHS days, I'm rather missing those darn things. They were so much more robust in surviving the antics of a 4yr old ruffian than dvd's and whatnot is today.
Not if said 4 year old ruffian figures out how to get to the tape and gives it a good old yank! Like I did....my father was most annoyed.😆
I remember when auto tracking came out and how it helped get the fuzz/lines off the screen. We are so used to HD resolutions today.
I collect vhs horror movies to this day! And yes I have a vhs player and still watch them on the reg.
There is a lot of nice stuff out there on VHS, that never made it to DVD, so yeah I understand you :p
@@FrightfulAccountant true. I still need to track some of those super rare 70s & 80s horror vhs.
scaryboi me too and recently my VCR stopped playing them. I think the head finally died on it 😒 it saddens me
@@mad_quack oh no! If you have a goodwill or thrift store near by go see if they have any for sale.
@@FrightfulAccountant Indeed, and most VHS releases in Europe were usually also completely uncut... So many DVD releases of the same movies are horribly cut or censored, even when the box says "uncut", it really isn't compared to the VHS version, especially not for horror movies. You took a wise decision in keeping the VHS collection (sadly, i was stupid enough to sell most of mine in the mid 00s, before i started to really notice how many scenes were missing from the DVD releases). Also in my opinion, nothing can beat old slashers on VHS, no matter what...the sound, even if it's supposedly worse quality, just does em so much more justice on VHS, and defects/gltiches just add to the atmosphere (same goes for the blurry picture, there's just something to it).
“Was VHS bad?”
*Several mid 70s-early 2000s kids are typing*
Early 70s too...
WerewolfLord VHS came out in the US in 1977.
NO It Came Out in 1976 in the US and Beta came in 1975
Chloie Kwirant hhhhjjhhdjdkdlksjhxzkxk"zkjhhxhgxgzgdhggxhzjkkskkzhbhzhzkzhxjjzjzvvjdjixhhffjjhdhhggdhxuixkcjhjjhdggxghxhhhdhxjjxxudkxxjcjcjjxkkxn xxnxnxmxmjxcnbv
Corinne Ininahazwe someone guide this blind guy
i’m only in my very early 20s but still grew up watching vhs tapes and started collecting them a few months ago… the quality gives me such a nostalgic feeling
Welcome to the club. I snap up any decently priced tapes that interest me. You can find interesting things on old recorded tapes.
Same!! I feel like I lived through the last part of the VHS era. It kinda began to die around early 2000s. But I still remember watching cartoons as a kid on them!!
Same. I was born in 1999. We still had a vhs up until 2008. I specifically remember watching The Little Mermaid and rewinding it back in the mid 2000’s.🥹
Same, let's form a community together
Remember designated tape rewinders? They went so much faster than your regular VCR
Yeah... sadly the DVD rewinders didn't really catch on, did they? ;)
(Yes... they actually made them. Even as dumb as it sounds)
Paddan You've got to be kidding... right?
I owned one. It saved wear and tear on the much more expensive player, and worked much faster. Biggest problem with mine was it was cheap, and broke after not a huge amount of use. Another advantage was you could pop in another tape and play it immediately without waiting for the rewind to happen.
The rewinder is a must have during that time. Saves times and prolong your VCR life from mechanical failures.
I've the cheap one that did not have any counter in it, so it can't be used to (re-)wind the tapes into specific 'play back time'.
Playing tapes on a VCR dozen't cause much damage. It's the rewinding and fast forward that cause them to break down.
I love VHS so much. I actually like seeing the imperfections. It brings me back to a simpler time.
I miss having to reset the tracking on VHS!
if you have a high end vcr and tape there won;'t ve imperfections. and yes it is simpler because it was well thought out
@@AlisonBryen high end vcrs did auto tracking so you always had great picture quality!
As a kid, I never really noticed. It was the "norm" back then. lol.
I actually never had any bad memories of VHS... only good ones. On my TV I had back in the day, watching cable or a VHS had no discernible difference. Good memories of going to blockbuster or Hollywood video, being able to pop a tape in and record anything I wanted, being able to connect camcorders to and transfer it onto a full sized tape to be played anywhere... and the list goes on. I actually feel there has not been any technology in modern times that could offer that much convenience as VHS tapes.
Brandon Ly Don’t need to record stuff, when you can just search it up on the internet.
True, but the feeling was different. See something I liked, pop a tape in and press record. Watch it later. With camcorders nowadays, sometimes people want it on bluray, DVD, or online. All of those formats require transcoding. Back then, plug the camera into the VCR, press record, and share. Do edits on dedicated equipment later if desired.
Not everything is on the internet.
I’m guessing Nostalgia is somewhat blinding you on the past. VHS wasn’t a perfect format & the introduction of DVDs demonstrated that the public was asking more than what VHS could offer by the turn of the millennium.
You also need to consider that CRTs are fundamentally different from LCDs, so the original tapes you had were optimised for smoother displays with low colour gamuts. Also because your capture format uses interlacing, you are getting a lot of artifacts in your final results that wouldn't exist on the CRT.
This video explains more: ruclips.net/video/V8BVTHxc4LM/видео.html
Same for 8bit to 32/64bit videogames. Much better in CRT with no progressiva scan and with scanlines.
And that capture devices typically aren't that great. DVD recorders are generally pretty good for VHS captures though.
Not just that but the crt you have makes the difference. 20” and below are perfect for vhs. Anything above that really isn’t ideal. Another thing is cables. My vcr has svideo and component out which are lightyears ahead of composite and rf.
@@gavinp5940VHS doesn’t benefit from those higher quality connections (S-video / component) because it’s encoded in composite.
I still love VHS and there’s a growing community of people that dub the new movies like The Joker and John Wick onto old tapes. They even make custom card sleeves with original artwork on them. Oddly, they can get pretty expensive but a lot of work goes into making them.
That's so cool
I don't remember them being bad at all.
aperson22222 it's because they were the latest technology we had back in the day. I remember when vcr's were hundreds of dollars lol
You also remember the humongous(for the time) 36" CRT TV being the holy grail of entertainment.
36" and 2 billion pounds(sure felt like it) of pure, grainy entertainment.
and the standard TV screen being 19"
ya the shift in technology isnt noticed when its progress forward, tv always looked presentable as it evolved, but going back in time you could see how poor it really was. as a kid i grew up on married with children for example. watching it as it aired all episodes "looked" the same. but rewatching them now you can see the quality changes over each season. i think the same applies to mono sound in tv vs stereo. the change wasnt super noticable unless you had the better equipment and watched some media of lower tech.
i think we can all agree when we flipped to digital broadcast the change was so big its impossible to go back. sparking the decades of "remastered" media to make watching tolerable. i do miss snow tho. was so much easier to watch a tv show with a little static than as it is now, where any loss of signal turns into a blocky unwatchable mess.
Joe Mieszczur Well only 1920eds film reel work on the moon so NASA can,t go back 😋 but robots on Mars have such limitations so you need such robots to help you with your blocks
"1985 VHS.." *Let me take this advertisement for a movie released in 1993 out of the package..*
That shrink wrap was a tell tale sign it was resealed... he bought a used copy
As child we had a guy come round every tues and fri nights in his van kitted out with vhs rentals. Jumping in the back and pick a film was brilliant and a fond memory from my childhood
That sounds so unbelievably creepy.
@@Whiteboykun only a creep would think like that
I miss their smell when they came out of the VCR :)
I like the warmth after rewinding them and taking them out cause I'm part of the 0.01% who rewinds them after Thier done
That smell... *pops open plastic VHS movie case* *sticks nose in*
*inhales deeply*
Instant happy. 🥰
What I don't miss from the vcr my family had was it trying to eat the tape at least once
I liked how hot the tape was when I got done recording them
@@EveryoneElseIsWeirdImNormal I'm a part of that small percentage, too! Haha we had a car-shaped rewinder. I think it's "trunk" was where we placed the tape.
For somebody who grew up in the 50s and 60s, they were a miracle.
Yes! They sure beat recording Star Trek on *audio* cassette so you could *listen* to it whenever you wanted!
Exactly. Not like we were sat there in the 80s thinking this is really terrible compared to what we’ll have in 30 years. Before tape, you couldn’t record and you had to wait 4 years to watch a film on tv.
The picture was more than fine on old TVs.
@@jgmediting7770 Yep.
“Holy shit, recording television? AMAZING!”
I still watch my VHS tapes all the time for the simple nostalgia.
I have hundreds of VHS tapes that I still watch and most of them are 6 or 8-hour tapes, so that's a lot of footage!
Rusty Shackleford when did VCR where discontinued
Me too, it's fun getting some friends together and watching a VHS movie on an old TV. There's just something inherently fun about experiencing old tech with your friends, especially if you have some nostalgia attached.
Stephen Seehorn I check out a VHS tape from the library one time called wakko's,wish and it almost mess up my vcr player because the tape is old
I still record new footage to VHS for nostalgia and convenience. Sometimes I record an entire season of shows from Netflix to a single tape and watch it off the tape.
As a kid in the 80s, growing up on VHS, as bad as they were at times, getting many from Blockbuster that people didn't rewind, especially the fuzzy while recording over them over and over and using the tracking, I still miss them. I still have a few tapes in 2021. They had charm, throw them around and wouldn't get damaged unlike Blu ray. They were bulky but loved them. It's a shame they no longer are seen much and world moved on from them mostly except finding them in thrift stores, yard sales, or select places. VHS will always hold a special place in my heart.
Block Buster was awesome. Going to the store, arguing with your parents over the wildly overpriced snacks. As a kid, it was exciting seeing all those tapes on display and picking one out. There's just something about actually handling all the boxes that you don't get picking with movies on prime.
That's *not* the original 1985 VHS of Back to the Future. u can tell it's an early or mid 90s VHS because of the Universal logo on the case/tape label
And the Jurassic Park promotion
It was the 1985 version but it went Back To The Future.
Pincho Paxton it all makes sense now
it's not???
I love stuff like this but there’s a huge variable you left out: viewing them on a crt tv. Of course a low res analog source is going to look bad captured and converted to digital and put on a higher resolution display. All those edge artifacts and stuff get lessened in the scan lines of a crt. I know there’s really no way to accurately show this effect with a RUclips video but keeping the source analog all the way through yields results that aren’t as bad as this video here. It’s like how PS2 games on original hardware don’t look very good on an hdtv but are still gorgeous on a crt. Still an interesting video, I thumbs-upped :)
PS2 games look fantastic when emulated in higher resolution. PS3's upscaler sucks but PCSX2 looks way better.
High definition wasn't a huge deal to your average person back then. A watchable picture was enough. I grew up with VHS in the UK. TV's and VCR's were wildly expensive in the 1980's, many people couldn't afford to buy them so rental was a boom market. Better models commanded higher rental charges, so most people just hired the cheapest available. Having a VCR was a luxury, the quality was almost irrelevant. Putting a cassette onto LP record, I don't think we even noticed the drop in quality. Renting a cassette from a video store, chances are there'd be a degree of wear and damage and we hardly cared. Pirated tapes, we'd probably laugh at the poor quality but admire the fact that we got it cheap.
HD doesn't mean a thing when the programming of today itself sucks...(.cough nonstop fake reality trash tv cough)
That’s right! Ironically though, as often said, people remember things differently and are prone to the commercial ad tactics and some are a slave to their own emotions and painting thoughts of the past in a better light when the arguments call for it, here comes the ole; “the good ole’days” that never were THAT good at the time they were occurring. As around why people began buying their music cassettes again on Compact Discs (CDs’) and you’re likely to receive mostly an answer concerning the sound quality being better. At least that’s what people used to say was the reason. Maybe now they’d say it’s the convenience of changing tracks at the touch. /shrugs But we were basically forced to begin purchasing music on CD and music stores were basically forced to change to change to selling the CD format by the huge distribution companies and labels that more or less said to music stores;
“We will no longer be excepting returns on unsold cassettes in exchange for credit. In an effort to align with the future format in the ever changing market of music and technology, we will only except returns from stores if the unsold merchandise is of Compact Disc format.”
...And that’s when you walked into the store to see that cassettes for nearly gone except for whatever is left on clearance racks. I remember that day very well.
Yeah i remember the "great thing" about DVD's were it was a "clear" picture without snow. No one cared about HD, Full HD or Ultra HD
@@michaezell4607 2004 called - they want their comment lamenting the lack of scripted programming back.... :-/
Yes - reality TV still exists but in 2018 (well 2019 now I guess) but it's been largely marginalized. By all accounts for the past 10 years we've been living in a golden age of well produced, well acted, & well written scripted television content + high quality streaming content as well from Netflix, Hulu, etc as well. If you think TV is still all reality TV garbage you've been looking in all the wrong places...
@Maurice Smith Wow - no need for ad hominems Mr Edgelord. Of course there's a lot of crap on the air (I'm looking at you TLC & Discovery Channel in particular) - there always has been - the point of my comment was to contradict his implication the programming quality during the VHS era was somehow superior. I don't know what world you're living in to discount the multitude of critically renown shows from the past 10 years. Not even including streaming services we've had:
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Halt and Catch Fire
Walking Dead (seasons 1,3-5)
The Americans
Wilfred
Atlanta
Fargo
Legion
Vikings
Westworld
Game of Thrones
Boardwalk Empire
The Leftovers
The Knick
Shameless
Dexter (seasons 1-2)
The Chi
Penny Dreadful
Outlander
True Detective (Season 1)
American Gods
The Expanse
...just to name a few.... But yes - I totally agree network TV sucks (excluding Bob's Burgers, Modern Family, & Blackish IMHO). All the talent & quality migrated to cable & streaming services a long time ago...
I remember the times when grandpa use to make me sit and manually rewind movies because he would say that the companies would intentionally make rewinders fast to break the film and ruin the VHS so u would have to buy more.
I had a toy raceway that would rewind tapes.
I actually think that VHS doesn't look half bad.
Nah, I actually find the imperfections to be rather charming. It doesn’t take a blind person to say that.
If you have the right equipment, they can actually look pretty good. I’m not saying that it’s great, I’m just saying that it’s not that bad. Don’t just assume that “VHS doesn’t look half bad” means “oMG VhS Is bETTer thAN 4K XD”.
It doesn't. Now, after it's been played 10,000 times, or if it's old or otherwise damaged, than it does lose it's clarity. Personally, I don't mind at all watching a 70s Clint Eastwood movie from a videotape. I like that old-school feeling. It doesn't have to be Blue-ray or even regular DVD. Why do you think people still buy and/or collect LPs or cassettes? It's Nostalgic.
They look better if you've got an old CRT to hook your VHS player up to.
My old VHS copy of The Blues Brothers is older than I am, but hooked up to the 32 inch Sony Trinitron we watched TV on when our even older one (with wooden fucking panelling!) was killed by a power surge, it looks pretty good.
Hook it up to the 60 inch plasma screen however, and I have to turn it off, it all depends on what equipment it's using, you've got to use equipment the format was meant to be played on.
Seriously, I must have really low standards if that clip from MIB was "surprisingly bad." Looked fine to me.
There was actually no need for better VHS quality back then since most people were watching them on poor quality TVs.
The same applies to the audio industry today, the quality has been down for 20 years since most people will listen to digitally compressed music on their earphones.
Digitally compressed reduce the quality. But most todays music isnt bad because of that. Music is not about audio quality. Back then there is high dynamic and flat equalizer from the studio which we can set it as we like using our device equalizer but todays music is mastered with super bass and low dynamic. Digitally Compressed or not if the source is worse then the result is worse.
We’re they actually ever bad!? I find them incredibly nostalgic. It was part of the entire movie experience.
the quality is bad, but the nostalgia is surprisingly good.
Nostalgia has to happen twice.
Your comment doesnt make sense.
*Were
I got a recent copy of evil dead 2 on VHS, movies like that are best in that format.
He is talking none sense, the matériel of recording is bad as well, what is he expecting
Back in the days, VHS wasn't about picture quality, it was about watching blockbuster movies in the comfort of your home!
I miss going to rental stores and video games. The whole family went.
schmidty im with you all the way there, every Friday night was horror night and we used to go to the local rental store be it Pharoes or Apollo and oder a rental, loved the choice loved the anticipation.
...wandering the store on a Friday night, hunting for something to watch because all the new releases are gone.
And watching the older movies. I recently watched North By NorthWest. Amazed at how good of a movie that was.
I seriously miss rental stores, especially the cool local ones with all the hard to find stuff.
- That special smell -
Ah, just nostalgic
Nothing but love for VHS. It’s probably (well, almost definitely) nostalgia talking, but adore the watching a film on tape days. Also, recording live TV and making tapes of favourite shows was something that modern tech doesn’t capture - recording fave shows on a digital box isn’t the same as making compilation tapes.
In the old days, you could record a TV show for a friend or neighbour and give them the tape. In the late 90s I actually traded tapes with people far away - I copied and sent my rare recordings and they sent me theirs. Can't do that now - there's no easy way to get the recording off the digital TV box!
Fun fact: PAL composite's signal is far more superior when it comes to color. MUCH less coloring artifacts, more detail and can even handle teletext. (just to add up, lol) Even we've got 50 FPS, it's just better looking through composite.
What's up with NTSC colors? Most of old recordings has incredibly wrong colors.
PAL has more bandwidth to store colors since it was designed after color video was introduced. NTSC had to pigeonhole the colors into to pre-existing B&W setup. It lead to a whole bunch of NTSC oddities, buy they were implemented so that everything would be backwards compatible on pre-color TV sets.
Also it's spelled "colour" in PAL regions
PAL is 25fps and NTSC is 29.97fps. There are 50 fields every second for PAL and 60 fields per second for NTSC.
Color was the reason NTSC dropped from solid 30 fps to 29.97.
ya, i used to play the PSOne and PS2 games on CRT with Composite in early 2000's. The PAL games (especially Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec) looked much better in PAL compared to the NTSC.
Damn, I can smell those VHS tapes!
Smells like a bad circuit.
Smelled like Radio Shack or Bestbuy
I love VHS, the quality is great, still. But I do have to mention I live in a PAL region.
PAL is a little higher quality than NTSC.
vinnien Why do you have to mention that, exactly? Lots of people live in PAL regions. Is that supposed to explain your love for it?
and the chance is very high the cable between the vcr and tv was a RGB scart cable instead of composite.
Erik Bruijn Uhh, but the SCART still carried composite unless he lived in France.
nope, i'm from NL and even there scart had RGB (and I'm sure because I had a TV that indicated it's receiving a RGB signal.)
Standard definition video looks better on standard definition TVs. Especially Sony Trinitron's. Not sure why, but it's true.
The Sony trinitorn tube is not a very sharp tube. A standard inline gun tube is sharper, and a delta gun tube is the sharpest of all due to the size of the phosphor dots. You should see the quality of my old Conrac broadcast monitor. Mind you that monitor was probably 10,000 when new.
Cool...I may look into buying one for old game system usage. Were there any other brands that used inline gun tubes?
How does that compare to FD-Trinitron?
I think its the interlacing that CRTs do. It's quite a pain for modern TVs to deinterlace old content.
VHS looks decent on plasma TVs too
Many directors collect VHS tapes. They tapes are just as good as the master copy of the film. Could always be restored digitally. Great video!
Once in a while i still use my vcr. For some reason i just love the old pixelated picture it gives off its more nostalgic than anything for me. Plus i love watching the old previews before the movie started and i love the physical feel of vhs tapes over dvds. I was using my vcr alot to watch the old Disney movies before disney + came out.
Cool, gotta love Disney plus, it’s the best thing out there! 👍
Ah man you can't beat the cosy feeling of vhs, I'm a movie fan to the grave, I got a hard drive with over 1000 films stored, plugged into my TV, all in HD with subtitles, that I can choose from and play in a second, without even getting up, but I truly don't think you can match the feeling of picking up a single case with a single film, looking at the case art, the nostalgic smell of the tape when you pop open the box, popping it in, seeing the point at which you last stopped watching the tape 10 years ago or whatever, it's so personal and nice. I think there's a lot of imperfection in perfection and that's what I find with HD, something about vhs is just unexplainable, it's real, its riddled with drawbacks, you can't have subs, pausing can be a bitch etc, but I like it, especially seeing as we live in a time where people don't even want to interact anymore. Typing became too much, now we ask alexia for weather updates and to teach our kids things that we should be teaching them, sheeeiiit, people even control their heating before they get home, and monitor their every step, it's becoming a joke, blockbuster was the best shit ever and I'll miss it too death, going out with a girl to pick a film, and awaiting watching it, making interactions with humans, it's all gone, vhs never forgets though, vhs for life motherfuckers
Edit: shit, I forgot about trailers, another enticing feature of videotapes, they're humorous, they sometimes show some great films you might have never even heard of, sometimes it's an old trailer of an old film you love and it's interesting, and sometimes you just come across some hella old Dr pepper adverts that make you laugh ur ass off, the texture of vhs is really good too, it transports me back to my favourite time, not all artists work are crystal clear, and that's what I see vhs to be, you wouldn't critique basquiat for drawing abstract work, it just is what it is and some people prefer looking at things that way
er tucch. I feel the same way. It’s nice to know someone else does too lol
Nicely said. Yes I have the same feelings about vhs... Video stores were awesome, and the cover art! Especially horror, fantasy and sci-fi films.
I don't much miss the quality, with the exception that some of the old horror flicks benefit from muddy low resolution and contrast. Atmospherically there's something about grindhouse-esque grainy degrading film that made them work, especially when low grade practical effects were involved; it muddied them unlike HD video which makes the imperfections very noticeable.
This was a beautiful comment one that I agree with 110%
blackham7 Thanks everyone I'm glad to see so many people agree! I love dvd too btw for some of the same reasons listed, but vhs is absolutely golden, I was watching a film last week called Killing Zoe off my hardrive and I had to turn it off and watch the vhs one instead, straight away I was transported back to older times, even though it wasn't wide screen and loads of the picture was cut-off, it's all worth it for the process, the sound when the tape enters the vcr it's so satisfying, it's real! And reading the case, looking at the front cover before you watch it just makes you want to watch it 10 times as much! Who remembers putting tissue or tape over to plug the hole at the bottom of a vhs tape so you could record films off TV too or doing the same with cassettes to record off the radio 😂 good times!
I don't feel that way about HD.
I do feel that way about 4k or uhd whatever
that vhs cant be from 1985, it had a jurassic park rebate flyer in it, which means it was probably cheaply pressed up to be sold for 5 dollars at a grocery store. the vhs tapes that were sold to video stores were higher quality tape so people could re-watch them alot, those ones usually hold up pretty good.
TheBombShhh It was also in cheap, shitty packaging, not a proper box. I think you're probably right.
It was probably just a newer copy of the tape from the 1985 master
I think someone screwed this guy selling him a fake copy............back in the days, even I did that a lot, because I owned TWO vhs players (one was recorder) so I sold copies of weird and rare movies or guitar concerts to people.........good old days!
And don't forget that tapes deteriorates over time, because the tape itself is very sensitive to humidity and temperature, and the material it's made of worsen year by year. But even more it's the magnetic signals stored that deteriorates because of the incredible quantity of magnetic fields we're living with, and that alone is responsible for a lot of the noise.
It's probably from the 1994 reissue, because that's when Jurassic Park was released on home video.
i have never heard anyone remembering them as terrible
in fact i loved using them
Probably somebody already mentioned that, but this rainbow effect is only on NTSC signal, if it were PAL signal, it probably would have better contrast and no rainbow effect...
Daniel Hikkamorii that's why it was derisively nicknamed Never The Same Color. The engineers had to do a lot of trickery to get color to fit in the existing signal specification and it suffered for it. I believe the European standards (PAL/SECAM) were built from the ground up for color and thus can mix chroma and luma better than NTSC.
Super Smash Dolls I know that, just think that needs to be mentioned.
Et ouais! french invention Bitch! :p
Tu peux pas test!
PAL/SECAM still use the same bandwidth which B/W and NTSC uses, but they really were designed after finding out NTSC problems and they were resolved in rather tricky way. The main signal is luminosity in all of color formats and there are two "color difference" signals. In NTSC they were coded simultaneously using "quadrature modulation" and because of radio interference they often ended mixed up. In SECAM only one color diff. signal is transmitted at time. For example, odd lines have "blue minus lum" while even lines have "red minus lum". Each TV set has ultrasonic delay line which in fact stores one of these signals, so each line have all 3 needed. That way horizontal resolution of colors is 2 times less than of luminance, but that's OK, it's the way human eye percepts them. PAL is a little more tricky, it actually uses quadrature modulation as NTSC does, but it rotates phase 180 degrees from line to line, thus its name: Phase Alternating Line! Some stupid TV sets decoded signal "on the fly", while the better ones used the same ultrasonic delay line to store previous line, so the two could be averaged and this way most of artefacts are gone, but resolution is still reduced by factor 2. Oh, the sweet times, building PAL/SECAM converters :)
Mostly correct. Both PAl and NTSC used quadrature modulation. PAL rotated the phase, and you are correct the resolution of the chroma signal is reduced. The big limiting factor on NTSC was the placement of the sound subcarrier. For years I had a big C band satellite dish, and would receive the broadcast NTSC signals (with the sound at 6.2 and 6.8MHz and the resolution was superior. I used a good monitor with a comb filter for color separation, and never saw all those bleeding colors that people with crappy cable TV did.
No vhs wasn’t that bad! Miss them sometimes
checkacola I tried watching Forrest Gump a few months ago on VHS and it was absolutely unbearable. The audio was barely there apart from the overbearing white noise and the picture was clearly fading.
DH_Artist yeah but you have to remember degradation of tape.
Also we went from TV 480i to 480p to 720p to 1080i to 1080p to ultra hi def so huge leap in the past what 15yrs or so. Technology jumped lightyears over night. I blame it on Aliens 👽.
Yes they were that bad. I miss nothing about them other than not having to be careful about scratches
@@DH_Artist you probably have to clean your vcr, especially if it hasn't been used in a long time. Dirty heads can cause problems with the picture and sound.
LCD dispalys don't do justice to VHS. Any analog video signal looks better on CRT because the analog signal syncs with the CRT electron beam. An LCD monitor has to use a picture processor to convert the analog signal to digital RGB value/intensity/position information, which is always a rough approximation. Also, LCD displays cannot actually show lower resolutions than the fixed native resolution assigned to the LCD matrix, which nowadays is 1920X1080 and higher. LCDs are able to do that by yet again converting lower resolution to higher resolution without adding an upscaling algorithm (only possible with digital signals through at least a component connector), which adds a lot of blur to the image.
Eli Malinsky Exactly. VHS tapes looked very good on my older TV, but not very good on my HD 4K.
The analog signal syncs with the electron beam but to doesn't look at better on a CRT because it introduces its own artifacts and runs on its own time base so they look smeary. An LCD infers some digital process which now is vastly superior to any VHS tape we ever saw in the Eighties, even on our professional decks that had time bae correction. Those professional units were the very pinnacle of what VHS could look like and it was still horrible compared to what we mastered on our 1 inch professional video decks at that time. Even played back on the very best prosumer VHS decks (of which I own one) VHS still looked terrible, at any speed, on any quality of tape.
Today the algorithms for processing video on LCD displays has professed so much that I have seen old VHS material look pretty close to an all digital DVD video played back on decent home gear today. These algorithms get better every year but VHS quality is still stuck today at where it was in the eighties, so I have carefully digitized all my old content, transferred it to my modern computer, transcoded it to h.264 (and now h.265) and despite not having a CRT, all my ancient content looks better now than ever before.
Billy Bob What about those VHS to DVD /Blu Ray transfers. Does that make the video quality better?
I've seen several that looked terrible and on the other hand I saw one that made the transfers better. It added noticeable noise to the picture but overall it seemed clearer so they probably just cranked up the sharpness as high as they could. I suggest trying the unit in person to make sure that it gives you reasonable results.
One thing that the video professionals I knew (myself included) had in our homes were the very final generation JVC S-VHS VCRs. These units were different from all other VCRs in that their picture quality is easily heads and shoulders about all else.
The story goes that JVC invented the core technology for VHS and only publicized the basic specifications to get everyone else onboard the VHS bandwagon but JVC held back a few concepts that they kept for their own professional units. Some of these improvements made their way into the last consumer units produced by JVC and even an average person who had no interest in picture quality would immediately notice just how clear these JVCs were even when playing back standard VHS (i.e. non-S-VHS tapes) tapes (both pre-recorded and homemade) tase that they would invariably as if it was a Sony Beta tase that was playing instead.
These units included a Two Line Time Base Corrector, S-Video output and multiple (secret) tweaks in both recording and playback that made all the difference in the world. IIFC the model numbers were the : JVC HR-S3600U and/or the JVC HR-S9911 (you should be able to look it up).
If you can find one of these units in god working order, Gove it a try and see if it helps deliver an improved picture to you. Make sure the heads are clean, I would replace all the belts and pay a professional to made sure that its tuned (timed) properly and then you should have as good a result as is possible without hiring an engineer to do it for you. Good Luck!
I was just about to come here and comment this. My VHS tapes look really good on my 26" 120Hz CRT TV but not that great on my 32" HD LCD. The LCD makes everything look a bit smeary.
I have no memory of it being bad at all. In fact, my memory is that it looked great. We always remember quality by what our impressions were of it at the time unless you're a certain comic book store owner.
"Original 1985 vhs tape"? There was an ad for Jurassic Park in the tape when you opened it! lol That VHS is a re release from 1993
Nope.
back to the future wasn't released for VHS until the 90s, hence the jurassic park ad.
First off Tigger - Used VHS didnt get repackaged in stores WITH brand new movies ads slipped into the box. No store is taking a used tape, wrapping it for resale and putting an ad in there - this literally and simply just did not happen. ALSO the Universal symbol in the corner of the vhs box was the 90's change over of the logo. The original tape HAD the original logo.
Secondly - "Back To The Future wasnt released for VHS until the 1990's" - What are you talking about???I STILL have the original release FROM 1985. VHS was KING in the 1980s and BTTF was the biggest movie of that decade - OFCOURSE it was around in the 80s. So bottom line - This tape in the video is a re-release when Jurassic Park was ALSO coming to video that year. Its not rocket science.
back to the future predicted Jurassic Park... mindblown :P
It's not a 1985 VHS tape. It had a coupon for Jurassic Park.
Ikr? That bugged the shit out of me.
still 20 years old though
+
Jurassic park was out in 1985???
the coupon was for the 80’s Jurassic Park
RUclips plus old interlaced digitally compressed is never gonna show how a real VHS is gonna look on a 28" CRT with your own eyes. It would be absolutely fine
Totally. The display is a huge part of it. VHS looks fine on an old CRT TV. Looks terrible on a flat screen though.
I recently acquired a Samsung VCR/DVD-R combo that outputs at 1080i through HDMI (there's also a subsequent model that outputs at full 1080p). I'd be interested to see this comparison repeated with one of those machines. I have to say, while watching some of my old recorded broadcasts, I was shocked to find that it looked better than I remembered. It varied with the differences between SP and SLP a LOT more than I expected but overall I was surprised.
I have the 1080p version. In my opinion I think VHS looks worse over HDMI than AV. I think HDMI allows you to see more flaws in the image than AV. However, most of the tapes I have I got from thrift stores and eBay, so I'm sure they had been played quite a lot. The DVD playback is great though it does a good job at upscaling the picture.
@@porkermurns7590 You know it might be down to my display. I'm using an old Samsung plasma as my main display. One of the reasons I bought it at the time was for how well it handled standard def material. It's not perfect, of course, but the HDMI signal gets rid of the color-bleed and inherent noise from an analog RCA signal. But you still have the sub-par, almost monochromatic, color at times. And flickering.
Ehh... The fact that there was a coupon for Jurassic Park when you opened it should tell you that that particular tape was not actually manufactured in the 80’s. Sure, the movie is from 1985, but it was a popular film, and MCA probably re-released it many times on vhs. An original release from 1985 or 86 would also probably have a slightly different label on the cassette (the one in this video looks consistent with MCA labels from the 90’s, not 80’s). Those early vhs tapes from the very first companies who pioneered the format used very high quality tape stock, very heavy plastic, just all around better quality. And believe it or not, its the oldest vhs tapes that will last the longest, they were the highest quality. Tapes manufactured in the 90’s (especially after dvd came out) and early 00’s especially were made on low quality tape stock and used probably cheaper transfer methods etc., and i find its those newer cheap featherlight tapes that are more susceptible to being eaten by a vcr odd enough. Just keep vhs tapes out of heat and away from moisture and they will last a very long time.
I would tend to agree with you here. I also wonder just how much vhs tape was type 1 and/or type 2 as they used in making cassette tapes so that comes to mind for me in how different brands made the vhs tapes for variants in their tape.
For a long time movies were way too expensive to buy on VHS. They were something like 60 or 80 bucks each. Eventually prices came down so low that McDonald’s was selling millions of vhs tapes with happy meals.
@@jacobbellwood6184 VHS tapes are more similar to type II audio cassettes than type I. They are also much higher quality than audio cassettes, as the video signal is much more complicated and requires much higher quality reproduction to meet the bare minimum if quality to display as a video without garbled colors and skipped frames.
You are right, as a Kid of the 80s we only owned 3 movies, we rented everything and the rest were blank casettes we used to tape TV shows over and over...but in the 1990 we got many movies from McDonald(back to the future was one of them).
Magnetic film media has a shelf life of 40 years. That's incredibly longer than any other media storage device made today or in the past 15 years
VHS wasn’t bad. It was just the technology of the time especially for home entertainment
composite is a big problem there in my opinion for me the scart port looks 100 times better
@NathBro scart carries rgb not composite (in my case, i know that it also can carry composite)
@@vincentschumann937 very true I always used scart
I owned a VHS player with S-Video out. Super VHS support if I recall, but that was the exception rather than the rule.
I bought the most expensive Super VHS player I could find hoping it would play my normal VHS collection better. I was pretty pissed when the VHS machine I bought at the Thrift Store played much better then the fancy Super VHS I bought off eBay for $400. Thankfully I was able to send it back to the seller for a refund.
Marty Moose A 4-head player is recommended if you’re trying to play old tapes. Actually get one with a DVD burned and start copying your tapes before they degrade further.
@@johnnycorona8851 My thrift store VCR I poke fun of it but it's actually really nice. 4 heads and that dial to super ff is pretty cool. When I was on my obsession with getting the possible picture I also found a 5 head VCR but it wasn't as good as my other one for picture quality. I was surprised when he said 4 head doesn't make a better picture. Maybe not on a raw feed to his capture device but on my CRT TV it was much better. 2 head VCR's always had visible horizontal lines on the CRT but not with any 4 head I've used.
Yup, I had an S-VHS player that had S-Video out back in the day...
Me too glad to see I'm not the only one who recalls something like that.
I never cared about crystal clear quality. I was just grateful to have entertainment so readily available.
One good thing about VHS tapes, if they got scratched they STILL played!
Yeah, but what dumbass doesn't rip their own DVDs for backup?
Or if the heads got dirty
encycl07pedia This dumbass (and actually everyone I know!) First, a big portion of my dvds were purchased before I knew ripping them was a thing. So, is it worth it? Is the software free or paid? Wouldnt you have to buy storage for the files? I just feel like I don't understand the point, I've never had anything happen to any of my discs so it seems like a lot of time and money with no payoff?
You'd commenting on the 8-big guy?
DumbAss
JVC SVHS vcrs have S-Video output. Also, in broadcasting class in high school, they had an old Panasonic SVHS professional VCR with both BNC and S-Video outputs.
It's a shame he didn't have a better player considering all the effort he put into this.
Amir Jubran I'm thinking that maybe the VHS tape he recorded onto would've looked a bit better with a better VHS player to record onto it.
That didn't help much, because the actual signal recorded on VHS was composite.
I never owned a VHS VCR.
Before digital video, I used Hi8.
Much smaller cassette, way better quality.
It actually recorded Y and C separately.
+lnpilot ah, good old 8mm. superior quality to vhs but boy were they finicky.
The BNC connectors were likely the separate Y/C channels. Depending on what you were doing. For example, the high school I had, had a Video Toaster that used the BNC as well, but the BNC connectors were just composite video. It just offered shielding, and the cables were 75ohm coax. You can find BNC Y/C to S-Video connectors online.
In general, the video is right, but the testing methodology is flawed since he used a first generation master video source that was higher resolution than the recorder. If he had used a S-VHS deck and connected it with S-Video connectors, but still used the same tape, the results would have had less chroma-bleed, but the resolution would have been exactly the same. All S-Video does is separate the Chroma and Luma, and it wasn't until YPBPR (when DVD players came out) that it was possible to get "perfect" analog transfers if the cables are high quality to not induce dot crawl (which is why the "squares" appear, that's dot crawl, improper multiplexing.)
VHS never skipped or locked up!!! ...especially at important parts of the movie! :P
I was watching Wonder Woman for work (my job is pretty decent, I must admit) on Netflix, and just as it got to the first battle scene, the quality went potato for some reason. VHS might not have been HD, but at least it was consistent!
Are you shaking your blu ray or did you just buy trash? I've never once seen a blu ray or dvd skip or lock up.
@@michaelmartin9022 this video is comparing physical media formats. Streams will always be lower quality than a physical copy. You shouldn't be expecting high quality from streaming services. It's simply unrealistic. Also, the quality on streams is usually dictated by your connection.
@@xjunkxyrdxdog89 you're lucky, then. Many have the same problem. No, it's not due to scratches. These are new, first watch, flawless appearance disks. Don't be ignorant. The publisher burn factories encode & burn too fast and errors are introduced in the bitstream. Data for DVD and bluray are compressed, highly. On audio CDs it's just like a .wav file or raw waveform audio except in plastic pits instead of vinyl grooves like old records. Very little compression, just a little off the top and bottom frequencies. That's why audio almost never had manufacturing defects & skips. You could have a few errors in the burn but almost no noticeable effect on the bitstream. Not so with DVD or blue ray. Smaller pits, more compression, more data lost if a write error happened, which they do, a lot, and the players can't figure out what to read after they hit the error.
@@xjunkxyrdxdog89 wrong, streams can be 4k lossless if you have enough bandwidth. HD streams take ~6mbps. 4k streams use 15mbps. If you put a 4k bluray disk in a player, pipe it to your home network, then watch that remotely in your own homemade "stream", it's the exact same - you just need proper bandwidth.
Another great albeit old episode! Consistently well done. One thing to add ...
This ignored "interlacing" and "upper and lower fields". Adobe's Google search is a good answer. In summary, low bandwidth video sent to old analog TVs worked well by interlacing and cutting up the video in horizontal strips called upper and lower fields. Like interlacing your fingers together.
Old TVs cannot show NON-interlaced video. *New TVs can. That means old video looks better on new TVs largely due to the lack of fields. Fields are in Render Settings and must be changed to see the difference. If a video already has fields, it's permanent. Gotta have a good source.
All the major artifacts in this video are from the fields.
When you watched the footage on the TV, it wasn't as good as your ripped version seen on the computer monitor. Old TV vs "new" Monitor.
Hope this helps. Surely many people have already said this, but this only helps the Channel. ❤
They where great I remember putting tape over the tabs and recording over them
I bought the Sony blanks, but that will work if your recording over a crappy movie.
*were
*great. I