VHS and SVHS Super VHS

THE HAPPY SATELLITE NERD EPISODE 14.1
Despite its designation as the logical successor to VHS, S-VHS did not come close to replacing VHS. In the home market, S-VHS failed to gain significant market share. For various reasons, consumers were not interested in paying more for an improved picture. Likewise, S-VHS rentals and movie sales did very poorly. A few pre-recorded movies were released to S-VHS, but poor market acceptance prompted studios to transition their high-end product from S-VHS to Laserdisc, and then onto DVD.

In the camcorder role, the smaller form S-VHS-C camcorder enjoyed limited success among home video users. It was more popular for the amateur video industry, as it allowed for at least second generation copies at reasonable quality (necessary for editing). JVC, Panasonic, and Sony have sold industrial S-VHS decks for amateur and semi-professional production use. Some public-access television stations and other low-budget cable TV venues used the S-VHS format, both for acquisition and subsequent studio editing, but the network studios largely avoided S-VHS, as descendants of the more expensive Betacam format had already become a de facto industry standard. S-VHS-C competed directly with Hi8, the latter offering smaller cassettes, longer running time, and ultimately selling much better. A number of colleges and universities also used S-VHS as a teaching tool for students, as the tapes cost less and offered more recording time than Betacam SP tapes, and yet students could still be trained on professional-level equipment. Plus on the professional level in the US a number of local access TV stations, and in Canada local cable channels used S-VHS in the 1990s to record and playback local programs, such as city councils and Christmas parades. For most of these stations, while the 3/4 U-Matics that they had been using were being phased out, but digital video was still years away, S-VHS was used to record from the composite setups that were still in place for U-Matic production.

As of 2007[update], consumer S-VHS VCRs were still available, but difficult to find in retail outlets. The largest VCR manufacturers, such as Matsushita (Panasonic) and Mitsubishi, gradually moved to DVD recorders, and hard-disk based digital video recorders (DVRs). Combination DVD/VCR units rarely offered S-VHS format standard, only VHS. In the mainstream consumer camcorder market, miniDV, DVD, and—eventually—solid state memory-based camcorders replaced S-VHS-C camcorders. Digital camcorders generally outperform S-VHS-C units in most technical aspects: audio/video quality, recording time, lossless duplication, and form-factor. The videotapes themselves are available, mostly by mail order or online, but are vanishingly rare in retail channels, and substantially more expensive than high-quality standard VHS media.
Home use[edit]

Getting the most benefit from S-VHS required a direct video connection to the monitor, ideally via an S-Video connection. However, older television sets lacked S-Video or even any AV inputs. Nevertheless, viewing an S-VHS recording through a VCR's built-in RF modulator yields a discernible quality improvement over VHS.

It is not unusual to see the term S-VHS incorrectly used to refer to S-Video connectors (also called Y/C connectors), even in printed material. This may be due to S-VHS having been one of the more common consumer video products equipped with the S-Video connector. However, S-Video connectors became common on many other video devices: DVD players and recorders, MiniDV and Hi8 camcorders, cable/satellite set-top boxes, TV-compatible video outputs on computers and video game consoles, and inputs on TV sets themselves. Where the S- in S-VHS means "super", the S- in S-Video refers to the "separated" luminance and chrominance signals.
Digital Voyage by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Artist: http://www.twinmusicom.org/

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