SMI Training Video for HP-48GX and HP-48SX - VHS Tape

[Chris Dreher]

I recently received and digitized a VHS training tape for the HP 48GX and 48SX called "SMI Training Video". It covers how to use some of surveying ROM card features.

In the background, you can hear 1990s office noise such as conversations, door knockings, phones, dot-matrix printers, and digital watch beeps.

While this is from an original VHS tape, the video quality is somewhat degraded. The original tape does have the audio slightly out-of-sync with the video (which was left preserved as-is), the stereo audio was misbalanced with clipping occurring on the right channel, the color is washed out, and various video digitization capture equipment struggled with the signal with the best results shown here. Some noise reduction was applied to the audio to reduce hiss and stereo channels were partially re-balanced.

[pinkman]

The introduction music is so much inappropriate, it’s really 90’s style!
Reading your warnings I expected something with a far lower quality, and it’s not the case. I think we’re at the best a VHS tape can do. Better is betacam, not VHS.

[Eric Rechlin]

Thanks for putting it online. I take it your version had the timestamp permanently overlaid on it? Hopefully someone else has a copy without that overlay.

[Thomas Okken]

Lots of VCRs didn't have real-time tape counters back then, so if you created an instructional video with a table of contents, with the idea people could fast forward to specific sections and not watch the whole thing in sequence, overlaying a time stamp was the only way to make that work...

[Chris Dreher]

The timestamp is permanently in the tape and, just like Thomas Okken said, it is so that folks can jump to a particular chapter. The thumbnail image for the video is of the VHS cassette's label which lists the chapters. This is the same thing that HP did in their "Learning about the HP 48" VHS training tape (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTPruRVV-e8).

Regarding the quality, I felt that the quality of this VHS tape recording wasn't as good as the "Learning about the HP 48" tape I did earlier. However, while the quality isn't as good as I prefer, the quality isn't awful either. Unlike HP's tape, I think SMI recorded and mixed all their video shots on VHS tape which is why it has a more worn appearance. However, this is just a guess. The tape is still good enough to do its purpose of training folks.

[MNH]

Brings back pleasant memories. Thanks for posting it!