whatever happened to them why did they fail ? giveing 400 lines compared with at best 270 on a VHS machine they seemed to have died. They would still give DVD recorders a good run for there money. i saw a supermarket selling them a year back very cheap .But as always the tapes are difficult to get. Oh well times ahve changed. How many of yu have the S VHS machines in our forum. I found the Panasonic ones best. i have had 3 of them in the past.

[Sonic67]

Originally Posted by flashgordon1952

whatever happened to them why did they fail ? giveing 400 lines compared with at best 270 on a VHS machine they seemed to have died.

I brought up something along these lines here:

Format war discussion part 2

[nvingo]

Just to add to the count.
My dad has a JVC and a Philips, and I've left at his house a Grundig, JVC and a full-size camcorder. I had a Philips too but that went wrong. Total six at the peak, plus a Hi-8 camcorder too.
When I get organised I have several hundred S-VHS tapes to scan for candidate material to transfer to DVD.

[Hal_loe]

I have a Panasonic NVHS950B S-VHS machine.

It was the first and probably the last VCR I bought.

I have been slowly transfering tapes over to DVD.

My Dad has a slightly older Panasonic S-VHS machine.

[Gavtech]

I still have five working S-VHS machines, [ Panasonics: FS90, FS200, HS950, and two HS830's ] albeit it is a bit of struggle keeping the older ones working... It's worth it though.... plus I feel obligated to do so.

Those first two machines were so expensive at the time, that today I could buy 10 High quality DVDR's for the same money.
The old ones are quite sophisticated editing machines, and are built like battleships.

They usually need some kind of attention every time I use them... albeit that is quite rare now... and it is always just for moving older recordings forward onto new digital media.

The newer ones [ 830's ] are lightweight simpler devices, but perform well ... arranged as a simple S-linked copy pair, and used in conjunction with the PC.
They were part of the last series that Panasonic produced.


Once you have used HDD based recording though... you never want to go back to tape.

[fizzy]

Guys

A google search brought up this thread as I'm on the lookout for a super vhs player.

So, if any interest ...

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6624979

Fizzy

[MarkE19]

I've got an S-VHS VCR (see sig below for model) but only use it every so often when TiVo is busy recording something and I want a second recording.

I think in the early days S-VHS was just too expensive for most people. You couldn't buy S-VHS recorded tapes so why should they splash out for a more expensive model? By the time they were down to a reasonable price PVR's & DVD recorders were starting to appear and take over from a VCR.

Mark.

[Mylo]

Originally Posted by flashgordon1952

whatever happened to them why did they fail ? giveing 400 lines compared with at best 270 on a VHS machine they seemed to have died. They would still give DVD recorders a good run for there money. i saw a supermarket selling them a year back very cheap .But as always the tapes are difficult to get. Oh well times ahve changed. How many of yu have the S VHS machines in our forum. I found the Panasonic ones best. i have had 3 of them in the past.

Me again

Guess which aircraft project uses SVHS, yep Tornado

The GR4 replay stations we built use medical grade Panasonic players, at about £1700 each they are a bit on the pricey side. They are perfect for the multiplexed imagery though.

[happyhomer]

I've got a JVC HR-S7955, bought around 5 years ago when the prices had come down, along with the cost of blank tapes. It doesn't get a great deal of use nowadays since we got a HDD recorder but still comes in useful when there's a second show (on a terrestrial channel) that we want to record. Picture quality is still spot-on

[NST]

Originally Posted by Gavtech

I still have five working S-VHS machines, [ Panasonics: FS90, FS200, HS950, and two HS830's ] albeit it is a bit of struggle keeping the older ones working... It's worth it though.... plus I feel obligated to do so.

I used to have a Panasonic FS100. The PSU was a bit unreliable, but after blanket replacement of capacitors and a few Zener diodes, it worked flawlessly right up until I sold it. I agree, the build quality was fantastic, even had a proper audio stage with high grade audio capacitors on it (Elna Silmic/ Panasonic Purism caps).
I still have a Philips VR813 which uses the same G-Deck Panasonic mechanism as the FS100. I find it more suitable for time-shifting and day-to-day use rather than editing. It even has VPT, Subtitle recording, 5 page memory Fastext, and RGB output built in. Not bad for something manufactured in 1991.

[energy80s]

I also have a JVC super VHS machine (in fact the third such machine as the other 2 died on me) and many SVHS tapes. I think the big problem with SVHS was the cost - introduced in late 1988 yet it would be 10 years before the sub £300 machines appeared. Also the cost of the tapes had to be factored into the equation - I never managed to get a tapes cheaper than 5 quid! However the picture quality was superb and has only been bettered by DVD/HDD recorders.

[nvingo]

Originally Posted by energy80s

However the picture quality was superb and has only been bettered by DVD/HDD recorders.

...Hmmm. Digital artefacts reign on MPEG (DVD) recordings. S-VHS is better quality in that respect - you need to record DVDs at HQ (1hr per disc) to come close.
But at least you get that quality for 15p/hr (that's my benchmark price, 50drum for £7.50) as opposed to £2/hr based on £5.99 for an SE-180.

[Paul Shirley]

Originally Posted by nvingo

...Hmmm. Digital artefacts reign on MPEG (DVD) recordings.

...and that's a clue. Most people seem happy with the often appalling image quality on Freeview, they just aren't very interested in the quality SVHS brings. A great many TV's of the time would have wiped out a lot of the difference anyway.

Affordable SVHS players offer nothing else users might want, they don't wind faster, usually have less features, give no improvement with existing stockpiles of blank tapes and there were no prerecorded tapes to buy in the format. It just doesn't look like value for money unless you're serious about image quality.

[mk-donald]

Got a JVC HR-S6600 that cost me £178 back in 2000 here that's still working fine, with about £800 worth of tapes - ie c80 of them gathering dust on the shelves!

Rushed out to buy it when my first Panasonic S-VHS gave up the ghost bigtime.

It became only a very occasional use gadget once I got a Thomson Tivo in December 2002 and started 'PVRing' with hard-disk that soon went from 40GB default to 240GB standard max usable. Tivo at £100 cost + £200 lifetime sub + £120 hard-disk upgrades = £420 has been the BEST money I ever spent on TV/recording! (The extra one I bought for my folks got sold for over £300 after 5 years so only cost around £1/month to own!)

Need to clear out the S-VHS tapes and transfer any keepers to DVD+R... but when does one find the time

[cdb]

I bought the JVC HRS9500 model for about £350 many years ago. I've hardly used it since I got it. It's still sat under my DVD hard drive recorder, I assume it works, who knows, I don't think it would give my dvd recorder a run for its money, maybe I'll have to try it again and find out.

[energy80s]

Originally Posted by nvingo

...Hmmm. Digital artefacts reign on MPEG (DVD) recordings. S-VHS is better quality in that respect - you need to record DVDs at HQ (1hr per disc) to come close.
But at least you get that quality for 15p/hr (that's my benchmark price, 50drum for £7.50) as opposed to £2/hr based on £5.99 for an SE-180.

MPEG 2 video needs around 6Mbps to look good. Nothing on Freeview or Sky goes above 5 with a lot of it running at around 3Mbps. Obviously this looks like ***** compared to an analogue picture, but with decent bitrates a digital image can look excellent too.