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New York City in 1993 in HD - DTheater DVHS Demo Tape

Youtube Pedant · 8.6M views · 2016-04-20 · 5:33

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Overview

Six minutes of street scenes from New York City in 1993, captured from a D-Theater HD DVHS demo tape that reused footage shot for the Japanese HiVision market. It shows Times Square and other sights in high-definition video.

On Hacker News

Pointed to as striking proof of how good 1990s HD video could look, and as a window into early-90s New York.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2016–2022

Topics

Audio & video engineeringWorld historyInternet culture & memes
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new york1993d-vhshd videoarchival footage

What people said

Bucephalus355 · 2018-09 · Recommendation

Apparently VHS came out with an HD format in the early 1990’s. Here’s a sample clip from 1993 of NYC: [VIDEO] It’s amazing. It so...looks like today, but it’s not. I don’t know how to describe the realness of image quality that looks like it was filmed earlier this afternoon but is in fact over 20 years ago. Unsettling yet beautiful.

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chaos_a · 2022-05 · Reference

> but there are no VHS cassettes that can match the clarity of 1080p or higher. A rare VHS format from 2002 called D-VHS could do 1080p on VHS tapes. [VIDEO] [LINK]

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nebula8804 · 2022-02 · Reference

Here is some HD footage of NYC in 1993...close enough: [VIDEO] This was way before HD was a common tech (this was during VHS's height right?). This was a demonstration tape of JVC's commercial HD cameras played back on D-VHS which never really took off (Digital HD video on VHS) Some interesting things of note: Clear images of the Twin Towers The guy wearing an SS t-shirt trying to block the camera at 1:42 Did people have differing dental standards back then? Seems like something has changed in the culture(3:58) Camel advertisement at 4:12 And finally....Ponytail guy making a quick peek at 0:58 :)

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Sources

Video by Youtube Pedant, played through YouTube.

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