Time hasn’t been kind to VHS, because VHS sucked as a format. It had so many flaws, I’m not even gonna bother to list them because anyone who was ever reliant on that format is already having PTSD flashbacks while they’re reading this sentence. We only used it because it was the best thing available at the time (other than BetaMax, of course, but the licensing fees that Sony demanded for it killed that format before it really got anywhere, and LaserDisk was absurdly expensive, and very cumbersome to handle). The instant a better format came along, we moved along with it.
VHS stood for nearly 30 years before it was credibly replaced. Just because something was eventually replaced doesn’t mean it was bad. It was an awesome format because it was affordable. You could have always mortgaged a home and purchased a professional deck.
There were plenty of other formats that came and went during VHS. Many took away consumers control of content. Only when flash cards came commonplace was the VHS and the ability to make mix and match your own media replicated.
You could deck to deck make your own tapes if you wanted and edit with scissors and tape.
It was good for its time, but we need to be careful not to confuse that as an absolute statement rather than a relative one. By modern standards VHS is garbage with many significant problems, it’s just at its time everything else was worse. There were certainly many aspects of VHS that were good some even revolutionary, but it also had many significant flaws.
When an objects time was nearly 5 decades that puts a bit of context around it. By modern standards nearly everything from decades ago is garbage.
VHS has many competitors, but they were too expensive to really challenge for regular people.
The quality of the media determined the quality of your experience. Cheap tapes broke and looked bad. The fact that a tape could be rented from blockbuster dozens of times really showed the durability of the media. Many tapes I had were pulled from rental pools and they looked acceptable.
deleted by creator
There were many other formats that came and went between vhs and dvd. There is a lot of media history being conveniently forgotten to make it seem like VHS was the only video format until 1995.
I owned many of them at the time they came out. They all had advantages and drawbacks.
when using the tv’s in most homes at the time, the advantages didn’t matter. You needed to use high resolution composite computer monitors with the video sources and surround sounds equipped receivers to get a significantly different experience. That was such an expensive niche .
The killer thing that vhs had over the numerous formats that came and went was price.
Once dvd got inexpensive enough it took over. That was about a decade after DVD’s introduction.
I agree that dvd will likely outlive the legacy of VHS in pure years.
So hyperbolic.
VHS was great, for its time. You can record over it again and again, like floppies. Crucially, they were cheap.
The biggest issue was your player. Shitty players liked to eat tapes.
That rewind noise then that sudden stop meant it was movie time! 🍿
No PTSD here. Just good memories.
You couldn’t record to laserdisc, right? My parents had a VHS camcorder with a selling point that it could also be used as a VCR (the recorder hung from a shoulder bag and could be separately connected to the TV). We have a lot of old home videos from that, and I remember us recording programs from the TV too.
Oh, yeah, camcorders could be used as a portable VCR. Thing was, the camcorder my dad bought used mini VHS tapes, so it was a two-step process to transfer them to the smaller tape, and then transfer it back. So the loss in quality from the two-step process was quite noticeable. It wasn’t until we got a second VCR that we could finally have much better quality copies.
I think we got one of those later. The first one they got was a monster of 1980s technology. It looks more like a news camera than anything for consumer use (although maybe not to actual news people).
What an ill-informed take. “The instant” in fact took several decades; between 8mm and DVD this was effectively the de facto format.
Ah so just like Xbox 360
The digital age will be a mysterious time to future archeologists. We are erasing our history as we write it to all of these replaceable media formats that require specialized tools to read.
This reminds me of Nina making magnetic tape at home
https://tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_nina/111275088385639559Hi Guys, the movies were meant to be watched on VHS. Head to VFA to show your support
