Quote:
Originally Posted by Electronic M
Nobody really wanted to record in BII anyway once the faster speeds were out since the recording time it allowed was so short.
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BIII (and VHS EP/SLP) is actually -slower- than BI or BII. The easy way to remember this is, "How long will the tape run before it hits its end?".
I rarely ever used the BIII speed (and I made very few recordings on any VHS machines I ever had, but certainly only at SP on those). SP and BI or BII were just reasonably acceptable for video viewing but the slow speeds were almost always lousy. Super VHS on a good machine may be an exception; when I got my HR-S9900U VCR, I did try Super-VHS EP speed and it did look pretty decent if I remember right.
It always amused (or annoyed) me that people would use the EP/SLP VHS speed and cram three movies on to one video cassette. When I got my first VCR, a Sony SL-7200 in 1979, recording one movie from a TV channel (such as "Jaws" when it was first broadcast) required two L-500 tapes at US$16 each, a full day's pay for me at that time for one movie.
So, ten years later, I could not understand anyone who was so cheap as to think "I do not want to spend two whole dollars (the cost of a VHS tape then) to record a movie, so I will pick this lousy quality and have to fast-forward through two movies, so I can save $1.33". Yecch!
