What does S-VHS do?

aekostas

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I arrived at the question maybe a decade too late, bu there you go :)

I am wondering if it's worth buying a S-VHS VCR, as my current VHS VCR is destroying tapes. But what kind of performance effect can I expect? Does S-VHS output enhance the viewing quality of all tapes, or is there such a thing as S-VHS tapes and recordings? I am thinking comercially produced material, like Star Wars IV-VI, the Godfather trilogy etc.

TIA! :smashin:
 
hello, to depart from the digital world we are in right now , a normal vhs
machine gives approx 250 lines horizontal resolution a svhs machine using
the correct tapes will ouput 400 lines as above . i sold my last svhs machine
a year ago ,a jvc s9600 and changed to a dvd recorder . maplins and
pricebusters on the web still deal with vhs/svhs media. if you want and
find one of these machines look for jvc/panasonic models regards trevor
 
I think that Trevor is alluding to blank tapes.
As far as I am aware there were never any prerecorded S-VHS tapes made, certailny not in the UK market anyway.
 
You need an S-VHS tape for higher quality recordings - they will record (and playback) regular VHS tapes but will not give the increased quality afforded by of S-VHS.

For replay, you get the quality of the tape you are replaying. Other than the possibility of using s-video out over composite and a s-vhs machine possibly of being of better quality than a normal vhs one, you are unlikely to see any benefit in using an s-vhs machine over a regular vhs one.

Just to confuse matters slightly, some vhs players have the ability to play back s-vhs tapes - this is described as quasi s-vhs playback. But these machines will not allow you to record s-vhs.
 
ianh64 said:
Just to confuse matters slightly, some vhs players have the ability to play back s-vhs tapes - this is described as quasi s-vhs playback. But these machines will not allow you to record s-vhs.


But some of them do allow you to record in quasi s-vhs mode on a normal VHS tape. I have a JVC machine (now relegated to my bedroom since my all embracing plunge into the digital world) which allows you to do this. It produces a very good picture quality too, certainly far better than just normal VHS recording. The recorder I have will also record onto s-vhs tapes, but I never bought any of these as they were far too expensive.
 
To distil the salient part out of all this:

There is nothing to be gained by buying a SVHS machine if all you want to do is replay already-recorded regular VHS tapes.

The SVHS advantage only occurs with recordings which were made on SVHS equipment (itself included) and with suitable tape.
 
anna the dub said:
But some of them do allow you to record in quasi s-vhs mode on a normal VHS tape. I have a JVC machine (now relegated to my bedroom since my all embracing plunge into the digital world) which allows you to do this. It produces a very good picture quality too, certainly far better than just normal VHS recording. The recorder I have will also record onto s-vhs tapes, but I never bought any of these as they were far too expensive.
If it can record onto S-VHS tapes then it is an S-VHS recorder not a VHS recorder which is why you get better quality. If it can record S-VHS onto VHS tapes, then it is the S-VHS ET format. I don't believe that these can be played on a regular VHS machine even though they are on a standard VHS tape.

What I was talking about was a VHS machine that can only record in the VHS format, irrespective of what tape is used but can playback a S-VHS tape although it will only be VHS quality. This is called Quasi S-VHS playback.
 

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