Which was better, VHS or Video8?

I'm old - so this is a video clip, originated on hi-8 when Sony released it in the UK

I have come through all these formats.
U-Matic low band
U-Matic High Band
Beta
beta-SP
VHS
S-VHS
Betamax
8mm
Hi-8
Philips 1500 series
Philips 1700 series
Philips/Grundig Video 2000
DVC
DVC-pro
B type reel to reel
C Type reel to reel
nearly forgot - at Anglia TV we had Panasonic MII

What's been forgotten is that within all these - some makes and models were really good, and were solid images with reliability and excellent performance.
For example - the very mechanical Sanyo 9300 beta machine was really tough in homes, as were the piano key operated Fergusons in VHS - easy to service, and good stability.
Some beta machines, like the Sony F1 was able to record digital audio with the optional unit - and a great product.

The broadcast machines were pretty good too - the Sony U-matics - 1850 stick in my head as a reliable one. I never used B format reel to reel, but the Ampex C format could go a couple of generations without getting soft. The hi-8 machines in that video were good - I still have a 9000 I found in the store - bought after that product release and what the tape was recorded on.

Of course we had good and bad tapes, good and bad maintenance and good and bad models.

We have got fixated on resolution and pixels and screen formats now - but the image in the late 70s from a u-matic at about 240 lines on a 27" Trinitron was damn good. Customers back then also had very variable quality TVs too. A 600 pound Panasonic or Sony looked visibly better than the 280 pound Sanyo or Hitachi. generally, beta was better, but VHS more popular - simply because of the market saturation from the small number of big sales outlets who tended NOT to do beta. For rental - popular back then, the Ferguson, made by JVC was also available in a Baird brand and a couple of others - rebadged products that gave the impression VHS was everywhere. Sony, Sanyo and Toshiba tried to hold on, but in the UK the battle was lost. VHS won.

Having gone through all these - none were head or shoulder above for picture quality - that was capped by the systems available - signal to noise, stability and copy loss being the critical things. In the video there is I think an early digital machine, was it called D1? Huge thin tapes?
 
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The prevailing opinion around the sales floor in the mid-1980's was that Sony/beta lost the market due to the general unwillingness to license the adult market - at some point, because there were XXX tapes on beta early on - whereas JVC had no such qualms. Sony also had other "our way or no way" conditions.

This was sort of what also happened to the L-cassette, which gave the reel-to-reel sound quality in a (large) cassette format. Sony didn't license it but it had no ability to release new recordings on the format, so it was mostly for copying for home use. And there it was easier to just buy a record.
 
I liked Digital-8 better than mini-DV, S-VHS, Hi-8, 8mm, 3/4 and beta. It was almost the same size as DVCPRO. So close you thought you could interchanged them in the deck, but you couldn't.
Yeah VHS is a horrible format, even using the expensive tapes but they have held up well for 30 years, surprisingly.
I intercut Digital-8 from my $799 Sony DCTRV 730 and my much more expensive mini DV cameras.
Hi-8 and S-VHS really looked a LOT better than VHS when viewed on a TV connected via S-video cable. D-8 was even better.
 
rob norton said:
roxics there's a series on netflix called Archive 81, it has lots of old tape restoration and older equipment throughout, you might like it.
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Been watching this show--it's not brilliant, I have a feeling I'll get to the end of the season and wonder why I bothered?

The tape restoration and handling sequences are fun, but so much liberty is taken in the name of storytelling vs reality that it is equally annoying. 25 year old 8mm tapes that had their shells notably melted by heat from a fire would I think be very unlikely to play back at all, let alone as cleanly as they are shown. No real attempt to duplicate actual tape issues (dropouts, sync error), just a made-up hodgepodge of static and rolling picture. And at the core of it, as the main character is tasked with digitizing and uploading the tapes, we regularly see him hit pause and rewind sections of tape which of course wouldn't be done during the digitizing process (and we do see him using the transport controls on the deck, not scrubbing through the digital file). Of course all of this is unnecessarily technical and falls into "who cares" territory in the big scheme of things, but it feels like it wouldn't have taken much more work to make it accurate.
 
CharlesPapert said:
Been watching this show--it's not brilliant, I have a feeling I'll get to the end of the season and wonder why I bothered?

The tape restoration and handling sequences are fun, but so much liberty is taken in the name of storytelling vs reality that it is equally annoying. 25 year old 8mm tapes that had their shells notably melted by heat from a fire would I think be very unlikely to play back at all, let alone as cleanly as they are shown. No real attempt to duplicate actual tape issues (dropouts, sync error), just a made-up hodgepodge of static and rolling picture. And at the core of it, as the main character is tasked with digitizing and uploading the tapes, we regularly see him hit pause and rewind sections of tape which of course wouldn't be done during the digitizing process (and we do see him using the transport controls on the deck, not scrubbing through the digital file). Of course all of this is unnecessarily technical and falls into "who cares" territory in the big scheme of things, but it feels like it wouldn't have taken much more work to make it accurate.
Click to expand...

I agree, I enjoyed the first couple of episodes more than the last few but won't say anything else. Maybe roxics would be better served digitally scrubbing through to any parts that catch his eye.

I was ignorant enough to not be bothered by how the process would actually work but I imagine it'd be pretty annoying for you. It seems like all the main character ever did was run that cloth on either side of the moving tape and that's all it ever took! They definitely could have played more with images that were only partially recovered (fewer clues) vs it mostly being easily viewed.
 
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