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Post #104039

Author
SilverWook
Parent topic
Was the Original Trilogy ever released to Super VHS?
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/104039/action/topic#104039
Date created
4-May-2005, 3:34 PM
Okay, I've been using S-VHS since 1988, pretty much the year it was introduced. The only pre-recorded titles I ever saw were from Paramount and the late Orion Pictures. They must have been marketed pretty badly, as I only ever saw them for sale at a high end video store where I bought my first editing decks way back in 1993. AFAIK, Fox never licensed films in any other videotape formats besides regular VHS and Beta. Ironically, they have released titles in the recent HDTV Digital VHS format, but not Star Wars...
And for the acronym confused, Super-VHS is the semi-pro broadcast cousin of VHS. It boasts 400 line resolution. (About equal with LD, but without LD's video gremlins.) It carved out a niche with people wanting to shoot better looking video in those happy go lucky pre-DV days and small tv stations that couldn't afford to go Sony. It never really caught the attention of Joe VHS consumer, but did find a second niche as a way to record digital sattelite for several years. There are still a few decks on the market, but they are pale ghosts of the machines I have. Most VHS decks on the market now have the undocumented feature of playing back S-VHS tapes at VHS resolution. (Kind of pointless, IMHO.) And now, you know the rest of the story!