Technical details
The VHS cassette is a 7⅜" wide, 4" deep, 1" thick (187 mm × 103 mm × 25 mm) plastic clamshell held together with 5 Philips head screws. The flip-up cover that protects the tape has a built-in latch with a push-in toggle on the right side, as seen in the Bottom View. The VHS cassette also includes an anti-despooling mechanism as seen in the Top View, several plastic parts near front label end of the cassette between the two spools. The spool brakes are released by a push-in lever within a 1/4" hole accessed from the bottom of the cassette, about 3/4" in from the edge label. There is a clear tape leader at both ends of the tape to provide an optical auto-stop for the VCR transport mechanism.
The recording medium is a ½ inch (12.7 mm) wide magnetic tape wound between two spools, allowing it to be slowly passed over the various playback and recording heads of the video cassette recorder. The tape speed is 3.335 cm/s for NTSC, 2.339 cm/s for PAL. A cassette holds a maximum of about 430 m of tape at the lowest acceptable tape thickness, giving a maximum playing time of about 3.5 hours for NTSC and 5 hours for PAL at "standard" (SP) quality. Other speeds include LP and EP/SLP which double and triple the recording time, for NTSC regions. These speed reductions cause a slight reduction in video quality (from 250 lines to 230 lines horizontal); also, tapes recorded at the lower speed often exhibit poor playback performance on recorders other than the one they were produced on. Because of this, commercial prerecorded tapes were almost always recorded in SP mode.
As with almost all cassette-based videotape systems, VHS machines pull the tape from the cassette shell and wrap it around the head drum. VHS machines, in contrast to Betamax and Beta's predecessor U-matic, use an M-loading system, also known as M-lacing, where the tape is drawn out by two threading posts and wrapped around the head drum (and other tape transport components) in a shape roughly approximating the letter M.
VHS tapes have approximately 3 MHz of video bandwidth, which is achieved at a relatively low tape speed by the use of helical scan recording of a frequency modulated luminance (black and white) signal, with a down-converted "color under" chroma (color) signal recorded directly at the baseband. Because VHS is an analog system, VHS tapes represent video as a continuous stream of waves, in a manner similar to analog TV broadcasts. The waveform per scan-line can reach about 160 waves at max, and contains 525 scan-lines in NTSC (486 visible), or 625 lines in PAL (576 visible). In modern-day digital terminology, VHS is roughly equivalent to 320 pixels of horizontal resolution with a signal-to-noise ratio of the image at 43 dB.
JVC would counter 1985's SuperBeta with VHS HQ, or High Quality. The frequency modulation of the VHS luminance signal is limited to 3.1 megahertz which makes higher resolutions impossible, but an HQ branded deck includes luminance noise reduction, chroma noise reduction, white clip extension, and improved sharpness circuitry. The effect was to increase the apparent horizontal resolution of a VHS recording from 240 to 250 lines. The major VHS OEMs resisted HQ due to cost concerns, eventually resulting in JVC reducing the requirements for the HQ brand to white clip extension plus one other improvement.
In 1987 JVC introduced the new format called Super VHS which extended the bandwidth to over 5 megahertz, yielding 420 lines horizontal (equivalent to 560x486 in digital terminology). For comparison DVD is 540 lines (720 pixels) horizonal. The chroma resolution remained the same at approximately 0.6 megahertz bandwidth or 30 lines horizontal, as was common across analog tape standards from Umatic to VHS to ED Betamax. Even a live NTSC broadcast is limited to 120 chroma lines maximum. (For comparison DVD is 240 chroma horizontal.)
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