OT: VHS

Bit of a discussion going on in another group about what this stands for. Wiki has it as 'Home Video System'.

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What do the old codgers here - who were around when it was introduced - think it means?

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    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
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Dave Plowman (News)
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Well the HS is for helical scan

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

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Reply to
N_Cook

JVC said it stood for "video home system".

While we're at it... Beta has nothing to do with the Greek letter (though Sony used the letter as a logo). It comes from a Japanese word meaning "surface coverage". Beta was the first helical-scan system without guardbands -- the entire surface of the video-recording area was used. Hence... "Betamax".

Reply to
William Sommerwerck

Video Home System.

Mark Z.

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Mark Zacharias

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
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Jeff Liebermann

Video Helical Scan

Marketing picked up and called it Video Home System, but it was a video recorder / player that used helical scanning. Beta did as well, the main difference being the simpler (cheaper to build) tape path of VHS vs the longer scan track (slightly higher video quality) available with the Beta system.

Interestingly, many commercial and broadcast recorders went with a reverse-image of the Beta system, called U-Matic, which was developed before either Beta or VHS, and which is still in use.

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none

I'm not an old codger but I understood it was 'Video Homes System'. Could be a translation thing the extra 'S'

Of course VHS was 'invented' by JVC after they stole a peek at Sony's Betamax system. And JVC allegedly stands for Japanese Vacuum Cleaner ...

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Adrian C
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Adrian C

Japanese Victor Company. They were given access to RCA Victor's home electronics designs after WWII. Chuck

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Chuck

JVC was originally "The Victor Talking Machine Company of Japan Limited" a subsidiary of the Victor Talking Machine Company. It soon merged with RCA becoming "RCA Victor". JVC pulled the plug, literally, during WWII, where it was deemed unfashionable to trade with Japan. JVC is currently part of JVC Kenwood Holdings Limited. None of the companies mention made or makes vacuum cleaners, but certainly have made other products that suck.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
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Jeff Liebermann

for.

So Victor Helical Scan is a logical acronym. I was always wary of "vertical" of VHS , the helical scan bit was fine, but vertical implies there was a (non existant? ) horizontal scanning system somewhere, to differentiate from.

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

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Reply to
N_Cook

Tape is horizontal scaning. VHS is not vertical anyway, it scans at an angle.

Audio tape needs to be one long continuous track. Video is separated into fields one with the even lines of a frame followed by one of the odd lines. The first video tape recorders used wide tape at high speed to get the bandwidth needed with horizontal scanning.

Helical scan video recorders work by scanning moving the heads at an angle across the tape in a circle so that they are in contact with the tape during the time there is meaningful information (scan lines) to be read or written.

The original system had 4 tracks, a luminace (white level), chroma (color information) a sync and control track and an audio track. Later recorders had stereo (2) audio tracks.

If you were to pour tape developer (remember that?) on a BETA/VHS tape you would see stripes at an angle across the tape. You would also see the linear tracks.

The audio tracks were low bandwidth (around 8kHz) so they were linear (horizontally scanned). Later Sony came out with Beta-HiFi which encoded audio as an FM subcarier on the video. VHS later came out with a similar system.

Geoff.

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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
Reply to
Geoffrey S. Mendelson

"vertical"

angle.

during

written.

But was there ever a rotational helical scan system with the axis of rotation of the drum being horizontal and the tape horizontal ? , in normal mode of positioning of the whole chassis that is .

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

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Reply to
N_Cook

video home system,. to have called it video helical scan or whatever would be sort of cheating, since ALL contemporary video systems used helical scan!

-B

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b

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Geoff.

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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
Reply to
Geoffrey S. Mendelson

Why a plural?

Not really. There was at least one helical-scan consumer VCR before Betamax. (U-matic was not a consumer system.) People forget that Betamax wasn't the first consumer VCR, it was the first successful consumer VCR.

Good joke, but it's Japan Victor Corporation.

Reply to
William Sommerwerck

Depends what the reference is. The very first VTRs - pro ones - had the head drum axis in line to the tape and wrote near vertically across the tape. Needed four heads on the drum to achieve this. Helical scan uses a head axis approx at right angles to this or the tape. But not sure in any way this is relevant. ;-)

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    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
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Dave Plowman (News)

Why is it that there is never any such thing as a "carrier", only "subcarriers"? There's no such thing as a woofer, just subwoofers?

I'm going to stop griping at this point, because I don't remember the exact configuration of Beta HiFi. Regardless, VHS HiFi is not all that similar to Beta HiFi.

Reply to
William Sommerwerck

Such a system would be impossible, because a horizontally rotating drum would not create a "stripe" pattern on the tape. It would simply scan the same area over and over again. The drum has to be tilted.

The original Ampex video recorder had the heads moving vertically across the tape.

Reply to
William Sommerwerck

This isn't considered helical scanning.

Reply to
William Sommerwerck

Depends when development started?

But my mistake above says inadvertently what I feel. Why name a new system so awkwardly - Video Home System - when Home Video System is how most would say it? Unless it were a translation from the Japanese.

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    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
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Dave Plowman (News)

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