DVDs vs VHS: How Different Are They in Quality?

The wholesale price for most DVD's is $15 to $20 -- whether or not the item is to be rented or sold -- reflecting the fact that it is much cheaper to stamp out a disc than to produce a VHS tape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Tape_lengths VHS did have limits in length, the longest seems to have been about 4 hours. DVDs not only have far higher quality, but can store 4.7 GB (double that if it's a dual layer disk).

There are many little things that make VHS a better choice; for one, you don't have to put up with the annoying pause when a DVD player switches between layers on the disc. Additionally, linear searches forward and back are much smoother than they are on a DVD player .. even the most brainwashed DVD junkies admit that searching DVDs is a bit choppy. The dirty little secret that the DVD industry doesn't want you to hear is that you can get roughly the same picture and sound quality out of a two-head Technics VCR for $39 at Wal-Mart as you can out of a "high-end" $5,000 Harmon Kardon DVD player ordered from some foo-foo electronics "boutique."

S-VHS improved the horizontal luminance resolution to 400 lines (versus 250 for VHS/Beta and 500 for DVD). The audio system (both linear and AFM) is the same. S-VHS made little impact on the home market, but gained dominance in the camcorder ...

Depending on the quality of that specific tape grade, the recording source and recording setting you can get quality about as high potentially even higher resolution than DVD (with caveats).

The picture was an excellent representation of the on-screen picture quality. I was then able to grab frames from this digitised version. Of course, for the DVD and Blu-ray versions I simply grabbed the relevant frames digitally from the discs using my computer. And then I made an assumption: I assumed that the only proper way to compare would be to assume that all three formats were being watched on a proper 1080p display. That meant scaling up the DVD and VHS versions from their native 576 pixels to 1080 pixels tall.

Of the remaining students, 19% thought that the VHS tape looked better! In other words, the students with a preference (narrowly) favored the image quality of the “inferior” VHS clip!

I won’t bury the answer at the ... The answer is actually pretty simple. DVDs were unequivocally, eternally, infinitely, and absolutely better than VHS in basically every possible way....

Then, when VHS was established, the rental and home movie market could flourish thanks to that foot in the door. However, DVD quality is superior to LaserDisc and far superior to VHS, so why didn't DVD recorders smash VHS?