Hi. I was interested in maybe purchasing the T-120 tapes here for my video taping needs. They are listed as being 120 mins, however all T-120 tapes I have ever seen are 6 hours on LP and a google search seemed to confrim this. I spoke to their representative in a chat and he said that they definitely were 120 mins, but I had my doubts since as I said before all T-120 tapes have been 6 hours on LP. Or do you guys think that they mean 120 mins on SP, instead of 120 mins period? I would really like to know if you guys think these tapes will contain 6 hours on LP and if T-120=6 hours on LP.
I don't think you will get the amount of time that you are specifying, but you may increase somewhat.
Unfortunately, it will almost certainly be at a cost of lower quality playback.
I don't think you will get the amount of time that you are specifying, but you may increase somewhat.
Unfortunately, it will almost certainly be at a cost of lower quality playback.
Thanks for your reply Doug. You said I wouldn't get the amount of time I specified (6 hours), but your link seemed to confirm just what I was thinking, by saying that T-120 are 2 hours on SP, 4 hours on LP and 6 hours on LP. It's mentioned in a table about 65% down in the article. So am I correct to guess that those unmarked T-120 tapes on Nextag are indeed 6 hours on LP? And btw I don't mind slightly lower quality playback. What matters the most to me is the fime length I get out of my tapes. I can live with the downgrade in quality if it means that I will get 6 hours out of the tape. If you look at the table it does say 6 hours on EP. Do you agree with this Doug?
VHS tapes do what is written on the box, they are not affected by the size of the data as an mp3 player would be, 120 minutes = 2 hours, simple as that, BUT, looking at that chart I see why you're having trouble, it's the difference in format thats causing you're tapes to do less than ours, as you're NTFS and we are PAL, there is one other factor that that is causing this as well, and thats the tape "Type" they are using, the T120 tapes will record 2 hours from that chart, BUT, the E120 will only tape 83min's, so look closely at the tape detail and see if it's a T or an E classified tape, and there will be you're answer.
Then as said above you can get LP (Long Play) machines, this very simply doubles the amount of time you can use on it, but it can reduce picture quality, although that said we've been using LP for over 20 years, and can't say the difference ever showed to us, and using LP means you only need half the amount of tapes that you would if using SP (Short Play), so give it a go and see what you find, just watch out for the type of tape to get you're time right, and don't use the 240 tapes, they are far to thin and break easy, just like the old audio tapes (120's IIRC) did, but the 180's are what we use all the time, but thats what I see from looking at that chart, hope it clears up some confusion.
