Comments

Rockaway17 wrote on 10/29/2001, 5:51 PM
When you're watching it on your TV through your VCR, it looks great because you're essentially running from your camcorder, with your VCR as the middle-man. When you copy it to a VHS tape, you lose quality because VHS tapes are all-in-all lower quality than Digital8 or MiniDV tapes. You're no longer running from a camcorder, so now you have to put up with the VHS quality. I get it too.
tserface wrote on 10/29/2001, 7:02 PM
This is pretty normal, but you shouldn't notice it that much unless you have a really lousy TV. Most DV camcorders have around 500 scan lines. S-VHS can do around 400, and VHS around 240. So, on a typical TV (which shows around 480) the TV has to make up for some of the lack of lines from the VHS tape sort of like resampling. You can do better with S-VHS, but you're not going to get digital quality without the camcorder. Like I said, though, you should see that much different visually unless you have poor quality tape or the VCR is lousy. I use a Mitsubishi S-VHS (795) VCR and it works great in all resolutions. I can barely tell the difference between the digital and VHS resolutions. If I need to copy I typically make an S-VHS master and copy from that because then every copy is as good as it can be.

I've also noticed that it makes a big difference having good quality VHS tape.

I'm certainly no expert at this, as you can tell, but I've been dinking around with it for a while now and I've gotten my videos to come out the best I think they can mostly by trial and error.

Tom
tinklady wrote on 10/29/2001, 10:31 PM
Maybe it's the projection TV. I try to always buy the tapes that say high grade but I was never sure if that really made a difference. I will try the S-VHS. Will copying from the digital tape for each copy give me better picture than copying from the S-VHS?
Thank for your help,
Tink
Cheesehole wrote on 10/30/2001, 3:49 AM
your digital source will always be higher quality than an analog copy made from it. therefore you should copy from the digital tape if you can.
jboy wrote on 10/30/2001, 1:25 PM
please note, you must have an s-vhs vcr for s-vhs tapes to make any difference. Using s-vhs tapes on a standard vcr is just a waste of money, you wont see any difference.
tinklady wrote on 10/30/2001, 8:53 PM
I have one S-VHS VCR but I have never use that feature due to the fact that I thought it could only be played on that VCR.
Thanks for all the tips
Tink
DavidW12 wrote on 11/2/2001, 11:41 AM
First of all, you must understand that VHS standards are inferior to most all other video tape standards. In simple terms, VHS sucks.

You might want to upgrade to SVHS or better. Or find a BetaMax machine. BetaMax was light years ahead of VHS in quality. But don't compare digital (or component systems) and analog (or composite systems) recordings...you won't be happy.

If that is out of the question, make sure that when you dub to VHS that you are using the video and audio inputs/outputs and NOT the RF connector. The RF method requires demodulation and modulation, and each time this happens quality is lost.