JVC Corp appears to have given up on its attempts to persuade customers to move from its 20 year-old VHS recording system to more expensive and higher resolution S-VHS, launched a decade later, and has instead devised a way of getting better quality through existing tapes. S-VHS machines offered double the resolution of the original 240-line VHS, but machines were expensive, as were the special tapes the machines required to work. Now JVC has come up with S-VHS-ET, which can use widely available and much cheaper HG quality tapes. S-VHS-ET VCR machines would still be more expensive than standard models. The 400-line resolution would be able to cope with the higher quality broadcasts from cable and satellite providers and camcorders, and be more able to cope with digital terrestrial broadcasting.
