VHS Tapes
Twenty-five years old and still going strong! The VHS format has been hugely successful since winning the war with the rival Betamax in the early 1980s.

VHS is slowly coming to the end of its life — some retailers will no longer stock it — but we know from our grass roots activity that somewhere between one quarter and one half of households will still purchase this format.

We then, can still produce on VHS when required — but it has to be said that most of our output for the worlds of Business and Education goes out on DVD and/or CD these days, sometimes with all or partial Internet play out too.

If you have any problems playing a new VHS tape (poor picture/colour/sound) the solution is often found with the tracking control on your video machine.

Although you may have been playing back your own TV recordings without any problems, playing back either an “unknown” tape just purchased, hired, or loaned, may require adjustment of your tracking control.

Many VHS machines have a tracking control knob, which when turned gently to one way or the other will vary the quality of both picture and sound.

More modern machines offer automatic tracking but there is still scope for manual adjustment on the remote control…..see handbook supplied with your machine.

If there is still no improvement, it would be worth running the videotape on another VHS machine, as your VHS machine may need cleaning.

Hopefully you television dealers can still supply a head cleaning kit which should solve the problem.