VHS

The Video Home System (better known by its abbreviation VHS) is a consumer-level video standard developed by Japanese company JVC and launched in 1976.

A VHS holds a maximum of about 430 m (1,410 ft.) of tape at the lowest acceptable tape thickness, giving a maximum playing time of about 3.5 hours for NTSC and 5 hours for PAL at “standard” (SP) quality. Other speeds include LP and EP/SLP which double and triple the recording time, for NTSC regions. These speed reductions cause a slight reduction in video quality (from 250 lines to 230 analog lines horizontal); also, tapes recorded at the lower speed often exhibit poor playback performance on recorders other than the one they were produced on. Because of this, commercial prerecorded tapes were almost always recorded in SP mode, although budget labels such as Video Treasures, Starmaker, Burbank Video, and even Paramount, as well as other smaller companies commonly used the slower speed.

VHS tapes have approximately 3 MHz of video bandwidth and 400 kHz of chroma bandwidth, which is achieved at a relatively low tape speed by the use of helical scan recording of a frequency modulated luminance (black and white) signal, with a down-converted “color under” chroma (color) signal recorded directly at the baseband. Each helical track contains a single field (‘even’ or ‘odd’ field, equivalent to half a frame) encoded as an analog raster scan, similar to analog TV broadcasts. The horizontal resolution is 170 lines per scanline, and the vertical resolution (the number of scanlines) is the same as the respective analog TV standard (575 for PAL or 486 for NTSC). In modern-day digital terminology, VHS is roughly equivalent to 333×480 pixels luma and 40×480 chroma resolutions (333×480 pixels=159,840 pixels or 0.16MP (1/6 of a MegaPixel)).

JVC would counter 1985’s SuperBeta with VHS HQ, or High Quality. The frequency modulation of the VHS luminance signal is limited to 3 megahertz which makes higher resolutions impossible, but an HQ branded deck includes luminance noise reduction, chroma noise reduction, white clip extension, and improved sharpness circuitry. The effect was to increase the apparent horizontal resolution of a VHS recording from 240 to 250 analog (equivalent to 333 pixels from left-to-right, in digital terminology). The major VHS OEMs resisted HQ due to cost concerns, eventually resulting in JVC reducing the requirements for the HQ brand to white clip extension plus one other improvement.

In 1987 JVC introduced a new format called Super VHS which extended the bandwidth to over 5 megahertz, yielding 420 analog horizontal (560 pixels left-to-right).

VHS