What Resolution Is VHS? Why VHS Looks the Way It Does
Updated October 17, 2026. We make REC, an iPhone camera with a VHS camcorder among its 23 looks, so the examples below are from REC. The numbers are general knowledge about the format.
VHS is soft in a very particular way. It is not low resolution the way a small photo is; it is sharp enough up and down and blurry from side to side, and its colour is blurrier still. That mix is most of what makes a clip read as "tape" at a glance.
The short answer
At the standard SP speed, VHS resolves about 240 lines of horizontal resolution. In digital terms that is roughly 320 by 480 pixels in NTSC countries and 320 by 576 in PAL countries. Colour is recorded at a small fraction of that, closer to 40 lines.
| Detail across the screen | Colour detail | Lines top to bottom | |
|---|---|---|---|
| VHS (SP) | ~240 lines | ~40 lines | 480 (NTSC) / 576 (PAL) |
| VHS (EP / long play) | lower | lower | same |
| S-VHS | ~400 lines | ~40 lines | same |
| Broadcast TV of the era | ~330 lines (NTSC) | higher | same |
| DVD | ~500 lines (720 pixels) | much higher | same |
The vertical number comes from the TV standard, not the tape. Every VHS recording plays back inside a full-height interlaced TV picture, 60 fields a second in NTSC and 50 in PAL. The horizontal number is what the tape could actually hold.
Why it is blurry sideways
VHS records brightness as a frequency-modulated signal with only about 3 MHz of bandwidth. Bandwidth limits how quickly the signal can change as the picture is traced from left to right, and that sets how many alternating light and dark lines it can show across the frame: about 240. Up and down, each line of the picture is a separate scan, so vertical detail holds up much better.
Why the colour bleeds
To fit on tape, VHS moved colour to a low frequency below the picture signal ("colour under") with roughly half a megahertz of room. So colour has about a sixth of the horizontal detail of brightness. A sharp red edge comes back as a red smear that spills past its outline, usually to the right, and saturated reds and oranges suffer most. That smear is the single most recognisable part of the VHS look.
The other things the eye reads as VHS
- Head-switch noise. The bottom few lines tear and jitter where the video heads hand over from one to the other.
- Tracking errors. When the heads drift off the recorded tracks, bands of noise and sideways shifts roll through the picture.
- Chroma noise. Flat areas of colour crawl with coloured grain, worst in shadows.
- Timebase wobble. The mechanical transport never runs perfectly evenly, so verticals bend and the image shimmers slightly.
- Dropouts. Specks and short streaks where the tape's coating has worn.
Recording speed matters
The same tape could record at SP (standard play), LP or EP (also called SLP), trading quality for running time. EP fits three times as much on a tape by moving it a third as fast, and loses detail and adds noise in exchange. Home videos and off-air recordings were often EP; rental movies were SP.
Digitizing: what resolution to capture
Capture VHS at standard definition, 720 by 480 for NTSC or 720 by 576 for PAL, using a deck with a clean picture and, if you can, a time base corrector to steady the wobble. Capturing at a higher resolution does not recover detail the tape never held. Keep the original capture, then deinterlace and upscale copies for modern platforms.
Getting the look without a tape
If you want new footage to look like VHS, the useful parts to copy are exactly these limits: soft horizontal detail, much softer colour, the bleed, the tear at the bottom and the hiss on the soundtrack. Grain and a filter on top of a sharp phone video tend to look like a filter; reducing the resolution and smearing the colour is what reads as tape. Our guide to getting the VHS look on iPhone goes through it step by step.
In REC: the VHS camera renders at half resolution with strong colour bleed, ghosting, tracking wobble and the head-switch tear, records mono sound from 110 Hz to 8 kHz with hiss and wow, and shows a seven-segment HUD with a blinking REC and "SP". For sharper tape, Hi8 and MiniDV render at higher resolution; VHS vs Hi8 vs MiniDV compares them.
FAQ
Is VHS 480p?
Not really. An NTSC VHS tape plays back inside a 480-line interlaced TV picture (576 lines in PAL countries), but the tape only resolves about 240 lines of detail across the screen. In pixel terms that is roughly 320 by 480: the height of a DVD, but about half the sharpness from side to side.
What is the resolution of VHS in pixels?
Roughly 320 by 480 in NTSC regions and 320 by 576 in PAL regions for brightness detail, at the standard SP speed. Colour detail is much lower, closer to 40 pixels across, which is why colours look smeared next to sharper edges.
Is S-VHS better than VHS?
Yes. S-VHS, introduced in 1987, raised horizontal resolution to about 400 lines, close to Hi8. It needs an S-VHS deck to play back at full quality, and colour is still recorded at low resolution, so S-VHS footage still bleeds a little.
What resolution should I digitize VHS tapes at?
Capture at the standard-definition size of your region, 720 by 480 for NTSC or 720 by 576 for PAL. Capturing larger adds no detail because the tape does not hold any more; upscale afterwards if a platform needs it.
Why does VHS look worse on a modern TV than I remember?
Old CRT televisions were small and soft, and their scanlines and glow hid the tape's lack of detail. A large flat screen scales the same 240 lines up several times, so the softness, noise and colour bleed become obvious.