/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5513190
>I'm not a huge proponent for VHS or anything, but for 99 cents it's amazing how good these look
I've made this same post before in these threads, so sorry if I'm basically just repeating myself, but I had a very similar experience. I've had my PVM for many years, and only used it for games, but last summer I moved house and had more room, so I decided to add a VCR to my setup after finding a really nice one for 10 bucks on ebay. I was never even a huge Star Wars fan, but I nabbed a set of the original trilogy and marathoned them all in one night and I fell in love. People always exaggerate or mis-remember how "bad" VHS actually looked. With proper tracking, good equipment, and a clean signal, you can get some damn solid picture quality. And with Hi-Fi stereo, which became standard on tapes in the early '80s, the sound quality is on par with CD. Plus, as you said, the softness of the analog image works to the favor of the special effects and smooths a lot of the hard edges of green-screen effects and the like. You still see an impressive amount of detail in the picture, too, especially if you're using a digitally-remastered copy of a movie from the later '90s. Not nearly as much clarity as true HD, but watching the original trilogy this way made me ask "Do I really need to be able to see the individual fibers on Obi-Wan's cloak?"

I grew up being a stickler for video quality, but now my stance on VHS is that, while it doesn't look anywhere near as good as HD, it still doesn't look bad in the slightest. My dad had a friend who was an electrician and into refurbishing TVs and A/V equipment, and he always used to say that analog signals "fail gracefully", and now I completely understand.