Composite video represents the first detected baseband form of picture information in a television receiver after the RF tuner. Initially being able to buy a television receiver with an auxiliary video input represented a significant cost upgrade for receiver manufacturers. But, it became necessary to add composite video to new receivers in order to support a growing market for an era of new, amateur videographers. In time, it didn't take long before the consumer became dissatisfied with using an outboard modulator to get an RF connection into the TV set. The quality is low at best.
Thanks to the VCR manufacturing industry, the consumer slowly embraced S-video through the marketing of the SVHS VCR. Of course, the manufacturers were forced to add the S-video connection in order to take advantage of the new technology available in tape recording. Building a new tape recorder with additional bandwidth that would be thrown away by re-encoding the video signal back to composite made no sense at all. Since the chroma information and video information are recorded as two signals on tape, why not bring it off tape the same way?
Well, this gets us closer in quality to the original source material if it were pre-recorded in SVHS mode. But, recording from regular RF or composite video feeds required reliance on the quality of the VCR decoder. Therefore, SVHS didn't catch on instantly, as most consumers had televisions without an S-video input connection. It has taken many years for the various appliance manufacturers to catch up with the market. The SVHS concept is now about ten to fifteen years old and has just really caught on in recent years.
Today, digital versatile (video?) disk, or DVD, is the new medium for video. Composite and S-video are the minimum output complement. Consumers are now aware, more or less, of the merits of S-video and many have television sets with the S-video input and output. But, a few DVD players are equipped with component video connections. Will there ever be an end to all the new formats and new connections?
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