What's new

Widescreen VHS on 16x9 (1 Viewer)

Jeff Kleist

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 4, 1999
Messages
11,266
The heads of your VCR will read the signal magnetically encoded on the tape, and will translate this in...oh, you mean the quality :)
Considering how bad they look on my 27", I'd say pretty horrible
Jeff Kleist
 

Han

Second Unit
Joined
Jan 13, 2001
Messages
262
Horribly. Usually stretched way out horizontally in "full mode" or with black bars on top and gray bars on the sides in "normal" (unaltered) mode.
 

Jeff Brooks

Second Unit
Joined
Mar 9, 2000
Messages
391
Location
Sugar Hill GA USA
Real Name
Jeff Brooks
In other words, there is no signal interpretation, like with DVD; so, I have no real advantage over a regular 4x3 TV? The only benefit will be that the tape has the "full picture image", as opposed to "pan and scan"?
 

Dmitry

Supporting Actor
Joined
Nov 30, 1998
Messages
742
I was under the impression that there was also a variety of zoom modes available of which at least one stretches the picture horizontally and vertically, filling the screen (you'd still get the black bars for aspect ratios wider than 1.78:1 of course but they'll be smaller) and keeping the geometry intact. With all that said, the quality of the image will appear to be horrendous, just like the previous posters stated.
 

Todd Hochard

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jan 24, 1999
Messages
2,312
Dmitry is correct- you can use the zoom mode, so that the geometry is correct.
As far as the "interpretation" that you speak of, I assume you are talking about DVDs that are encoded for display on 16x9 TVs. Widescreen VHS tapes have no such encoding, so they are displayed just as a non-anamorphic DVD would be. However, with the reduced horizontal resolution of VHS, they generally look, uh, not too good. :)
I have made a 16x9 encoded SVHS tape from a DVD or two, as an experiment, and it looks OK- still not nearly as good as the anamorphic original.
Todd
 

Jeff Brooks

Second Unit
Joined
Mar 9, 2000
Messages
391
Location
Sugar Hill GA USA
Real Name
Jeff Brooks
You guys were right. Raiders looks like crap-grainy as hell. But, when I record in the "virtual" s-vhs mode off cable, the output looks pretty decent.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Forum statistics

Threads
356,818
Messages
5,123,885
Members
144,184
Latest member
H-508
Recent bookmarks
0
Top