VHS Quality

[phatslug]

How does VHS (you know, video tape) quality compare to VCD or DVD? I recently went on a vacation and filmed alot with my digital camera, then sent it all to my comp, editied it, and sent it back to the camera, played it on the tv and hit the record button on the vcr. Some one pointed out to me that 'anything' is better than VHS. Is this true? I have a DVD burner, whats the best way (highest quality) to get the video to my tv?

Thanks for any help.

[MaDmiZe]

DVD is far superior to VHS....Not only in video and sound quality...but it will last longr with out this quality degrading. Depending on quality you should be able to put 2-3 hours of video on each DVDR.

[phatslug]

DVD better than VHS, makes sense... let me extrapolate my question
did my digital camera record *.dv files with higher quality than VHS, so that putting them on a DVD actuallly would lead to some noticeable quality increase...

and how does all this compare to VCD and SVCD. Are those higher quality than VHS??

thanks

[kwag]

How does VHS (you know, video tape) quality compare to VCD or DVD? I recently went on a vacation and filmed alot with my digital camera, then sent it all to my comp, editied it, and sent it back to the camera, played it on the tv and hit the record button on the vcr. Some one pointed out to me that 'anything' is better than VHS. Is this true? I have a DVD burner, whats the best way (highest quality) to get the video to my tv?

Thanks for any help.

My suggestion: Take your vacation film and make a DVD AND a VHS copy.
Sounds ridiculous? Well, as far as quality, DVD just beats them all ( for now ), but as far as reliability 8) Ha Ha. I have some VHS tapes from around 1982, and they still play!. With drop-outs and noise, but they still play!. I have a DVD that we bought for my daughter, "Toy Story 2", and it's not even 2 years old and it developed fungus on the media. Result: Doesn't play anymore My wife has another DVD that has a similar problem. This one, doesn't show any media problems ( scratches, etc ), but it doesn't play anymore. That's two DVD's in a collection of about 80.
But then, she also has about 60 VHS tapes, and they all play!.
So we're doing great in quality as time goes on, and sucking bad on reliability
And if a VHS tape breaks, I can splice it together, and keep on playing it again. Not so with a DVD. Just makes me wonder where we're headed.....

-kwag

[hkmak]

Personally, I found that VHS actually capture the HIGHEST quality possible for my DV cam, because there is NO bitrate limitation and disk capacity to worry about. VCD, SVCD or even DVD are compressed video using MPEG-1 or 2 encoding. The highest bitrate for your DVD burner can go is only 8000kbps, for simple and slow moving scene you can't notice any different, but when come to complex and fast moving scene and watch it over a big TV screen, you will see "blocks" appear.
The down side of VHS tape is, the quality will decrese when time goes by or if you copy from one tape to another, but miniDV tape will not. So, the best quality and economy (DV tape is cheaper than DVD-R disk) way to store your DV cam video is store it in your miniDV tape.