... R.I.P. VHS - BBC News Japan 'to stop making VCR machines' - BBC News Will you miss your VHS? :icon_wink
Really? I thought it happened a long time ago. But RIP childhood - The days where you could fast forward through commercials :lol:
I'm still hanging on to my VCR. I still have plenty of movies on VHS, and also my family's home videos are on either VHS or Video8/Hi8 (which is why I also still hang on to my Hi8 camcorder).
I almost cried when I thought my VCR died, and I'm never going to toss it out. VHS is still an amazing format, and I hope it makes a comeback again, especially in the horror community since there are some companies that are distributing new movies or rediscovered ones as tapes.
Most old players use standard sized parts (drive belts etc.) that can be bought at a Radio Shack or hardware store. So you should be able to keep your old VCR running for years to come. I have a few VCR's that I got at yard sales for free, and I have an epic collection of good movies for them. Indiana Jones Trilogy, the Star Wars Trilogy, Animal House, Ghost Busters, Terminator, Jaws, Rocky, The Blues Brothers, Raging Bull, Psycho, Taxi Driver, Escape from New York, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Evil Dead, etc. etc. etc. I also have a laserdisc player, a CED player, and a betamax player. Gotta love obsolete formats. I got them all for free at yard sales and have had to do some repair work on a few of them, but the parts were readily available or I found something that worked. Like using a PS2 power cord for the laserdisc player.
I have a huge box full of VHS tapes, and I have a hybrid DVD/VHS player. I'm gonna be clinging onto that for a while.
You can stream all that now. I threw mine away. Good riddance. Though I do miss never dealing with skipping. I don't miss rewinding, tuning, and the player eating tape every once in a while.
LaserDisc actually did better than some other formats. It was the preferred format for early high end surround sound systems. My favorite audio dealer, in fact, only had a LaserDisc player in his store in the early 1990s for demoing surround sound systems. The wider market, of course, went totally VHS...but LaserDisc hung on as a niche format for the purists until DVD came along. And LaserDisc was still preferred over DVD by some for a period.
Yeah, I know it was really popular with videophiles and movie buffs. Unfortunately for Pioneer, it never caught on with the general public. Also, what a lot of people seem to forget is that VHS and DVD coexisted for quite a while. Like, the number of weekly DVD rentals didn't exceed the number of weekly VHS rentals until June 2003.
There is an ugly reality with home entertainment formats in general. When there is a format choice, convenience usually wins over quality. Cassette tape was vastly inferior to open reel tape, but won because it was so much easier to use. The FM stereo system was the lesser standard proposed, but it was a convenient choice. CD was a ghastly format in its early days for audiophile types, but partly won the mass market because it was so handy. As for LaserDisc vs VHS: both could play prerecorded movies. But VHS allowed taping, and had "good enough" performance for most people. Indeed, I had an interest in quality audio in that era, but don't recall having much interest in doing much past VHS. Well, I'd have been interested...but it would have been very low priority.
Lol, I thought that too... I still have a lot of Vhs on my house, they are full of power rangers episodes and Dinosaurs documentaries.
