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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Do the tapes still look okay? I remember when I was a child near the end of the VHS era, my parents tried to show us a copy of Back to the Future they'd bought when that movie had come out. The color had noticeably faded, to the point where I remember it almost looked black-and-white at first.

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I have a large collection of commercial tapes from the 1980s and have not noticed any degradation. I have picked up degraded tapes from the thrift store, though. I suspect it depends on storage conditions.

Another thing to mention is that the VHS tapes generally give a much nicer image than DVD. Tapes have better tonal range and lack other compression artifacts.

Overall, yeah. And it may be changes in the settings too.

More and better content driving chroma harder = lower setting.

On a reasonable VCR, and a good display, noise tends to come up more than color loss accumulates.

Also, people would back off on the color some anyway. The resolution was not all that great. Driving it hard, like we are used to now may well wash away some detail.

This all improves on a CRT with good analog circuits.

There is a review of VHS, Laserdisc and Blu-Ray on this very movie. So I think this is of relevance here :) I think it also talks about screens the different media is made for as a factor in how it looks.

https://youtu.be/hUQvnxxTuM4

> Do the tapes still look okay?

In the last couple months I've just been digitizing my old VHS tapes from late 80s to early 90s. (As well as my 8mm tapes from late 90s.)

Happily, all of them have been in great condition.

How are you digitizing the 8mm tapes?

I've digitized my family video VHS tapes using an old computer and a tv-card, but apparently there are some 8mm tapes from before my time that could use digitizing as well but I don't know how I would go about doing it.

I haven't done it, but I generally trust Alec in those things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC5Zr3NC2PY

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