With recent improvements of image quality and increases in the amount of image information available, it has become necessary to develop a VTR that allows high density recording. In the conventional helical scanning method, however, a tape can not be made too thin because it is coiled around at an angle. The tape tension thus becomes high and the stress applied to the tape when loading becomes large. We therefore propose a new linear scanning method in which the tape is coiled horizontally and the head moves up and down. We evaluated various architectures experimentally and found that stable recording and playback with a track linearity of 5 μm or below was possible at a track width of 20 μm.