For the show's tenth anniversary Netflix has posted season one of Stranger Things in a deliberately VHS-grade version - softer, blurrier and cropped to 4:3 with pan and scan, so you get black bars down the sides on a widescreen set. The Duffers framed it as how the show would have looked sitting on a rental shelf in Hawkins, and said if enough people watch it they might do the other seasons. You find it by searching Netflix for Stranger Things VHS.
The gimmick is fun. What actually interests me is that it exposes two things at once.
One, an encoder problem. Tape look is noise, and noise is the most expensive thing you can hand a streaming bitrate. A real VHS had fine, moving, chaotic grain. A streamed imitation of it is going to get smoothed into blocks and smeared in dark scenes, so there is a decent chance the fake tape looks less like tape than tape did.
Two, the display. VHS artifacts were tolerable because a CRT was hiding them - phosphor decay, interlacing, scanlines, a soft mask. Run the same signal at a modern OLED's pixel response and you get every flaw with none of the forgiveness that made it watchable. That is why so many retro console purists went back to CRTs. This is the same argument arriving via Netflix.
Also worth remembering what pan and scan actually cost. It is not a filter, it is throwing away a third of the frame and then panning across what is left to chase whoever is talking. A whole generation grew up watching films butchered that way.
Has anyone put it on a decent display yet - does it read as authentic or just broken?
The gimmick is fun. What actually interests me is that it exposes two things at once.
One, an encoder problem. Tape look is noise, and noise is the most expensive thing you can hand a streaming bitrate. A real VHS had fine, moving, chaotic grain. A streamed imitation of it is going to get smoothed into blocks and smeared in dark scenes, so there is a decent chance the fake tape looks less like tape than tape did.
Two, the display. VHS artifacts were tolerable because a CRT was hiding them - phosphor decay, interlacing, scanlines, a soft mask. Run the same signal at a modern OLED's pixel response and you get every flaw with none of the forgiveness that made it watchable. That is why so many retro console purists went back to CRTs. This is the same argument arriving via Netflix.
Also worth remembering what pan and scan actually cost. It is not a filter, it is throwing away a third of the frame and then panning across what is left to chase whoever is talking. A whole generation grew up watching films butchered that way.
Has anyone put it on a decent display yet - does it read as authentic or just broken?
