Is VHS Dead in the Water?

Not quite TV related, but it does have huge importance, so I thought i'd post it here.

Dixons have just stopped selling VHS Recorders because they say they are outdated and we should move on to DVD.

What do we think. Do we think that VHS has passed it. Should it be laid to rest?

Personally as much as i love my old VHS tapes, DVD is the way forward, as you pay almost the same yet get a lot more. On the flip side of the coin though when you buy a VHS you don't expect it to freeze in the middle of the recording, which is what tends to happen too often with DVD. So DVD you get more but with VHS you get more reliability.

What do we think?

See, I didn't understand why many reports yesterday said "people aren't buying VCRs, they're buying DVD players instead - so the VCR is therefore going to be redundant". That's comparing apples and oranges - one's a recorder with the flexibility to take your recordings to anywhere there's a VCR, the other's a player - and just a player. The redundancy of the VCR will come at digitial switch-off - it'll be a heck of a lot less useful then - who can blame people for not wanting to buy analogue at this time of digital encouragement?

Do DVD Recorders come with digital tuners? I haven't seen one - perhaps they think we'll all have PVRs... but they're hardly flexible in that everything's stored on a hard disc (I'll just lumber that around with me if I don't want to watch it on the television it's attached to then).

If Dixons really wanted to be forward thinking they'd stop stocking analogue products of any description - we'll start with TVs!

And then there was this blue disc format I saw waved before me on last night's Ten O'Clock News - the successor to DVD? Are we going to go through the Betmax-then-VCR "revolution" all over again?

I'd hold back and wait and see what really will become the mass market product of the future. I'm unsure as to what it's going to be at the moment!

That is true.

The problem with digital storage is that it gets better and better on a regular basis. I'm sure someone invented a successor to DVD almost as soon as it came out. Yet you can't ram these things down the publics throat and then expect them to change so quickly. I think DVD will be around a lot longer yet!

Blue laser technology is already here in the form of direct-to-disc broadcast formats such as Sony's XDCAM. Whether it will cross over to domestic appliances remains to be seen - it certainly doesn't look like it in the short to medium term due to the overwhelming popularity of DVD.

It does seem to make sense to have "everything" on the same format

i.e. CDs/DVDs/CD-ROMs (etc) mean that computery stuff, film/TV stuff and music are all on metallic circular discs of matching size.

I'm all for that.

Well, that's hardly suprising when you tink most people have a VCR, but there's still a lare amount who don't have a DVD player. People will be buying DVD palyers because they don't have one, but aren't buying VCRs because they do. Surely people are still replacing VCRs when their old ones die?

Personally, I'm happy with my VCR. Decent DVD recorders still aren't a price we can reasonably record, I still record onto video quite regularly. I have no intention of giving it up in te near future. And I don't want to go through the nightmare of transferring all my VHS footage.

I think the real reason Dixons are ditching VCRs (though their sister chain Curry's isn't...) is that they are now extremely cheap items, with very low profit margins. They are pretty bulky items, and are increasingly low quality as they are engineered down to a price. You'll need to sell a lot of them to make any money. I think that DVD players (and recorders) are mechanically much simpler, smaller, more reliable, and actually cheaper to manufacture, meaning there is likely to be a greater profit margin. Add to this the growth in the market - as people are still buying their first DVD player - whereas most people now have VCRs - and the DVD player market is a better market to be growing.

It also got Dixons a nice lot of free blanket advertising in the run up to Christmas as well... (Just as the opening of the Apple Store did for Apple!)

Dirty great big black video tape or nice shiny DVD's with loads of extras... hmm! I just can't decide LOL!

Yup, but if you drop your DVD on the floor and it gets dirty, will it play as good as before? If you accidentally scratch it will it still play alright? Was it written properly at the factory and so therefore will it stop working in the middle of play and just freeze?

Although DVDs are great and will last forever if looked after, they can be very easily damaged whereas VHS is a lot more reliable in that respect.

I just don't know about that. You sound like you may have had some bad experiences with DVD! All dual layer DVDs freeze momentarily when switching layers half way through, but surely it can't be true to suggest that a VHS VCR - with it's delicate mechanical transport system - is more reliable than a DVD player? Clearly DVD will be superceded by something better one day, but in the meantime, I know I'd rather archive important footage to DVD than keep it on a very fragile piece of oxide-coated plastic!

You could say i've had some problems. I've bought Blake's 7, Coupling, Red Dwarf, Jeremy Clarkson, Futurama, Star Trek and other DVDs which have just failed on me, will freeze in the middle of playing. Nothing to do with my DVD player, as i have tried them on other DVD players which have worked fine, just my bad luck. After sending these DVDs back, all of them turned out to be authoring/rendering problems at the factory and i get sent new ones. This has never happened with VHS before. Ok so I buy loads of DVDs and it's a small percentage, but that's enough isn't it?!

I don't think that VHS's are dead yet and hopefully they will still be round for at least another few years, hopefully they'll last as long as the Audio cassette compared to the CD, they're not as big as they used to be, but they're still here. But some people prefer not to change over and the price of VHS tapes keeps coming down and down, loads of places sell cheap videos these days. So they're not quite dead yet.

BTW I got a DVD Recorder from Asda today for £140, cheapest I've seen one, only records DVD RW's, but thats fine.