Comment by giantrobot

For me and most people I knew at the time, VHS didn't have a noticeable quality loss over broadcast unless you were watching LP/EP recordings.

Many TVs people already had in the 80s didn't have RCA connections so VCRs were connected via twin lead to F connector adapters. They had the same noise as the antenna or cable input. So your commercial tapes usually looked about as good as broadcast. If you actually read the instructions with your VCR to set the timing correctly recorded broadcasts in SP mode also tended to look pretty good.

In absolute terms the VHS video was worse than the original broadcast but on the TVs we had it was hard to notice.

This definitely changed through the 90s. Larger and brighter tubes made the deficiencies of VHS more noticeable. Moving to cable TV from antenna was also very noticeable and made VHS quality more apparent.

If you happened to see a LaserDisc video as a comparison to VHS then the quality difference was stark. As much as VHS and DVD by the late 90s and early 00s. However I think that direct comparison was out of reach for most people.