[emeritus]

Domestic TVs were not capable of displaying 625 line analogue transmissions at their full resolution. I remember reading an editorial in "Wireless World " in the early 1990's titled something like "Who needs HDTV?" pointed out that the crt's of consumer TVs were only capable of displaying about half of the horizontal line information of a 625 line broadcast, the exception being some JVC models that had a 50% finer colour stripe width. Mention was made of a BBC demonstration of HDTV to some of their executives where one had commented on the picture quality, and that that this was the way of the future, only to be told that the demo hadn't started and he was actually watching a properly set-up 625 line studio monitor. Apparently this was one reason why people were satisfied with VHS VCRs that only recorded half the horizontal information: on the typical TV you couldn' tell the difference between live and recording. The only time I could see any difference between live, VHS, and SVHS was when I borrowed a video projector from work and tried it out at home on my matt cine projector screen (3' x 4', giving a 60" diagonal), using the S- video outputs of the TV and SVHS recorders. With this size of picture, the differences could be seen.