What happened to all the D-VHS hype? (1 Viewer)

[Josh Dial]

I for one and simply tired of format wars relying soley on quality of presentation. There comes a point in a artform where you can move so far away from caring about presentation, that it's ALL about presentation If you follow me here.
I have seen VHS. It looks good for a time, until it wears out, but that aside, its decent for quality. However, it rarely features OAR, and almost no extras (only tacked on deleted scenes etc at the end). AND you have to fast forward, rewind blah blah blah bling bling blah.
I have seen LD. It's cool, good quality, disc changes are liken to FF/RW if you ask me, but it's better. Also, we get oar, better sound, etc. This is good.
I have seen DVD. Looks darn good to me, sounds good, is good, real good, mmmmm good. Has extras, usually more than LD. Now I'm watching FILMS in my house basically, semantics aside. A lot of the studios genuinelly want to put out a good product, and they do. Bash on, flame on, whatever
I have seen DVHS. Looks DAMN fine. But it's still tape, blah blah blah... HOWEVER, my complaint is, is that now, we have gotten so tempted by HDTV, that we want movies to look like real life, or something like it. Well, I don't want to watch real life, I want to escape it for a few hours, and watch films. Sure DVD doesn't truly look like film, but at least it ain't trying to look like something it's not (real life).
DVHS is awesome for recording HDTV or other things. I will buy it for that. But I don't want to start down the slippery slope of having movies constantly undergoing quality upgrades. I mean, how damn good do we want this shit to look?
It's gotten to the point for me, and I'm sure a few others here as well, that all we want is a quality product, that will last, will look good, is cheap enough, and value (read:extras - I'm an extras whore ), and respects the art form I love. DVHS as a movie-transport, simply comes off to me as a spiteful, one-upsmanship that has come out not to appease movie lovers ala LD, but to BRING OVER J6P to a "better" video. Well, they can have it
cheers all!
Josh "people like me shouldn't have degrees"

 

[Jim Peavy]

So you can't play the movies coming out on pre-recorded hi-def D-VHS on anything but the JVC machines that are capable
of "D-Theater" playback? But, all hi-def, digital VHS machines are capable of recording a hi-def signal and playing it back in hi-def, correct?

 

[John Berggren]

Provided you have the right source and the right outputs from said source.

 

[Willem Vos]

There's no such thing as truely "digital" media, it is all just analog information interpreted as one of two values, and that interpretation is not infallible

Still, apart from scratches on the disc/tape, it is pretty close to being infallible. The error correction makes sure of that.
But I suppose a really worn out digital tape won't be "read out" so well...
Are they using the same material for DVHS as for VHS-Tapes?

 

[RobertR]

Another way to ask is if you take the D-VHS version and the HD-DVD version of say, U-571 compare them side by side will they be indentical in picture clearity?

Purely speculative question that can't be answered now. IF they use the same bit rate and IF they use the same transfer with the same compression etc. etc. etc. they will look identical.