Unfortunately for me, the teachers always played crap like Barney which the rest of my class seemed to enjoy. All I could do is sit there and think, "What the hell is wrong with you people." I also use to get in trouble for not wanting to watch Barney or take naps with the rest of the class.
I still have many VHS tapes and quite a few of the plastic cases. Since I store my tapes in boxes but love the cases, I use the cases as storage boxes. I can make that sound any time I want... Beautiful sound for VHS fans.
I miss the whole VHS "process." The whole "be kind rewind" at rental stores, the large plastic case(including the snapping sound), buying blank ones to record, forgetting to snap off the tab and recording over a favorite event.
The thing is, it wasn’t bad quality… just seems it now because we have the tech that we do. No way in ‘87 would I have said “I can’t watch this, quality is terrible”
@@shinyhorse8045 Im 42 and yes..spoiled to the core but when you watched vhs tapes in very bad condition even for.. mm 1990 i remember that i started to curse a lot.. jajaaa.
@SlowHandMcQueeg I'm 41, my grandparents at that time had some beta tape and no it wasn't soooooooooooo much better, it was just slightly better but not by much, I remember. If I'm not mistaken 8-bit guy has a comparison vid between vhs and beta on his channel and pretty much confirms my argument and drills your into the ground. So stfu with hyperbolic BS.
I grew up in the 70s watching hockey on a 13" B&W T.V. with rabbit ears. Now I can't change the channel fast enough if I end up on a non-HD channel by mistake on my 65" 4K. Like you said, we accept what we have.
@@danimcfly5992 haha yeah!! Luckily though for me I've got my mate lol he's obviously not got a full shops worth but one of his livingroom walls is just VHS and it's a big room! So many I have never even heard of!
They were never that bad, they just got outdated. Everything for the time was literally the best until the next best thing comes along then we get spoilt by it.
LCD screens were better only on resolution and size/weight against CRTs, everything else (color, contrast, brightness, viewing angle, response time) got much worse and things are only catching up now
Not once did I ever think that vhs was bad growing up. When dvds came out I was only excited about the amount of space on the shelf they would save and not the boost in quality.
I loved DVDs because I was (and still am) a film nerd and the directors commentary blew me away. I loved hearing the filmmakers and actors talk about the film
@@SpongeSebastian They did but were expensive and needed a writable DVD which were also expensive, they gradually became common and cheaper but we were moving onto sd cards and usbs.
It will be 2080 and I'll probably still have my VHS tape collection if every single one of them manages to stay intact and not get destroyed in some kind of flooding or house fire.
Yeah, just give it some more time & we'll be nostalgic for dvds & Blu-rays, once they're obsolete. I know i'm gonna hold onto mine. I will never accept streaming. I want a physical copy of a movie or tv show, to own.
To think that all these artifacts and quality imperfections are now pretty much an aesthetic in its own league is so charming, yet so weird to think of.
I guess it was inevitable, people are nostalgic for their childhood and it's a reaction against the overly crisp, digital images we're used to nowadays
You mostly notice these artifacts and imperfections on modern screens because they aren't designed to display this type of content/signal to begin with, lol. A 720p video on a 4k screen will look like crap but a 480p video on a 2k CRT will look waaaaay better and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
OldClam5 VHS was a pain with all the rewinding and so on I admit. But there were many movies out on video that have yet to be released on dvd, or versions that have been released but have had scenes edited out. So unless you’ve kept a version of the movie on Video of which you can get transferred to a dvd, it could be hard work trying to find a version, or an original version of what you’re looking for.
As a kid in the 80s just the fact that I could watch cartoons when they weren’t being broadcast on tv was a big thing. We didn’t care about picture quality, because most tvs were the same (the big fuss was if your friend’s folks had a big tv, which in those days might have had a screen somewhere in the mid 20 inches!). I have a handful of VHS for nostalgia but for me the leap to DVD was phenomenal. The picture was massively better, no rewinding, able to skip to any part of the film and all the extras! Sure, the piracy ads were a pain but you just did something else whilst they were on (and with how slow Blu ray can be it was preferable). I have found a lot of those ads can be skipped or fast forwarded anyway.
VHS was much better for cartoons anyway, they look just fine, the picture quality only really starts to look bad with live action, and even that's only because we're now playing these tapes on flat screens 5 times bigger than anything they were designed to be played on
you guys are probably native english speakers so maybe did not care so much. But another great advantage of DVDs was being able to choose your audio language and subtitle tracks, which is a big leap as well if you live in a country with systematic and not always nice audio dubbing.
As a parent now, and child from VHS days, I'm rather missing those darn things. They were so much more robust in surviving the antics of a 4yr old ruffian than dvd's and whatnot is today.
Looking back, VHS does look bad. But only because we are now use to better video. VHS was about the best we had for home use at the time. It is nice to have lived long enough to do the comparison.
There were the odd enthusiasts that were into Laserdiscs at the time. I knew no one personally that had any but my high school music teacher had a Laserdisc player for the classroom upon which we watched West Side Story. That always struck me as hilarious, not only having a machine that not a lot of people own but also a movie that not lot of those people would probably buy for it. :)
I had a laserdisc player with about a dozen or so movies, and they did have a somewhat higher video quality than VHS, plus CD-quality digital sound. The biggest selling point for me at the time was that they tended to be letterboxed, showing the full width of the movie, while VHS versions tended to use the severely cropped "pan & scan" format. Eventually, DVDs hit the scene, which had a slightly higher quality than the analog-video laserdisc.
Beta had better quality than VHS, Beta only lost because of its shorter duration tapes. Oh, and Laser Disk had the best quality for home use at the time.
I have some Laserdiscs now but they're more for just novelty. I only paid a couple bucks for each, two of them being Ghostbusters I & II. :) The overwhelming majority of my video collection is VHS and I'm perfectly okay with that. I'm not all that hung up on picture quality when it comes to old movies. I've seen enough classics remastered in high-def to know I don't want to see all the imperfections in props, costumes, makeup, and sets that we never used to pick up on in SD being exposed. Hell, I have several obscure movies that never received DVD reissues so there's not many other ways to view them outside of videotape.
My local movie store had to stop charging because literally nobody rewinded the movies. I did, because I'm not a fucking lazy twat. But most people around here just didn't bother. It always sucked when I used to rent a movie and had the rewind the damn thing.
Thats fine , tape what you like . The only thing is the resolution sucks . Colors bleed with technology tv that we have . I had in the early 2000 a DvD recorder that used blank discs the same way as tapes but you couldn't tape over them . I used to reuse the spool to hold all the discs that had 2 - 3 movies on each one . You can find old machines and I know where one is that Im willing to swap with the owner since they only use it to watch movies.
just started collecting myself. as part of growing up in the 90s / 2000s, Family never had $ to rent @ blockbuster so now I have over 100 titles & play them everyday every hour once i'm home.
Happened to a very dear recording from 2003 here. It frazzled a good 10 seconds of it - I thankfully was able to save the rest. Cause: a plastic pillar that had come loose and decided it wouldn’t catch onto the tape. Instead of just rejecting it, the tape was already out, fully exposed and it got caught in the rest of the mechanism as it ejected. So much fun. I took for granted that it would happen eventually. Got a new machine, top of the bill late 2007 build, and have been happy since 👍 as for the precious tape: it comes out at special occasions only 😂
i’m only in my very early 20s but still grew up watching vhs tapes and started collecting them a few months ago… the quality gives me such a nostalgic feeling
Same!! I feel like I lived through the last part of the VHS era. It kinda began to die around early 2000s. But I still remember watching cartoons as a kid on them!!
Same. I was born in 1999. We still had a vhs up until 2008. I specifically remember watching The Little Mermaid and rewinding it back in the mid 2000’s.🥹
Television screens are a series of dots like pixels watching a VHS tape on say a 14'' the picture quality was reasonable but change it to a big tv say a 25--29'' then you will notice the difference, do not sit to close it looks ok but get in close the picture quality is not as good, i am not sure if the dots ( sorry i can remember the correct name ) varied between say a cheap tv and a higher quality tv.
I don't like streaming services, so luckily i don't have to experience opening the netflix app. I do enjoy popping in a BD though, retains part of the VHS era. ^^
As child we had a guy come round every tues and fri nights in his van kitted out with vhs rentals. Jumping in the back and pick a film was brilliant and a fond memory from my childhood
VHS were good. They gave people the ability to record off TV and rent movies. VHS didn't have the picture of DVD, but thank goodness for VCRs in the 80s and 90s
I've already seen some people saying that there's a "flat spot" in the history of archiving broadcast TV around the end of VHS and the start of modern "Smart" formats (or just big enough hard drives to save loads of video to). I think there were DVD Recorders back in the day, but people just wanted "a DVD player" and got the cheapest one, without recording. There were hard drive based "boxes" for the likes of Sky TV, but they only had limited space and deleted old stuff automatically, also people didn't record the ads / news / other interesting bits and pieces, only shows and movies, which you can get on DVD anyway.
+Dan Livni-They sure didn't have the audio quality either. . .Or the durability. . .Over time, the more you used VHS tapes, the more you destroyed the film inside of it to where it eventually became slowly degraded. . .unusable. . .Fortunately, and through a sheer miracle, despite that we owned our own massive library of VHS tapes (which I wish we still had even today :D, I'd definitely want to hold on to them. . .), very few of our tapes ever suffered that problem. And between eight people in the entire house, our tapes were ALWAYS in heavy rotation, rewinding, fast forwarding, and rewinding all the way back to the beginning. . .Especially because we only had one major tv system throughout the entire house, and one tiny tv/vcr player in the bedroom, so every moment you could claim the vcr player for yourself was utterly indispensable. :D. The VCR players were often far more unreliable than the tapes, for us, they would often jam, or one of my nightmares, occasionally spit out the tape where the entire film was left unspooled, broken, and completely unusable. Despite all their problems and unreliability. . .I still do miss VHS players/tapes and had a hard time getting used to the emergence of DVDS. (And now I just mainly stream everything in an instant online, and pause, rewind, and fast forward with the click of a mouse. ..) Despite their problems, they were great for the time they were in. They were the absolute best we had at the time. Like every piece of technology throughout time, each new successors get far better with time. Improve from their predecessors to where probably even in the next even five years, streaming (or whatever will come after streaming and Blu ray) will become even better. The quality has vastly improved so much within the last 20 years between vhs, then dvds, then blu ray and streaming (and video recording making way to dvr, which made way to clicking with a button on your remote, to just an internet streaming feed), that I wouldn't be able to go back to using tapes. If I had to, I would use them again. It's so far ingrained in muscle memory, I definitely know how to still use them, but I really wouldn't like them as much anymore and see far more of the flaws I wasn't able to as a kid. . .But I am forever glad we had vhs as a kid. . .
Maybe I was just young in the 90's but as far as I can remember back in those days we weren't as obsessed with picture quality as we are now. I think the big obsession with picture quality came when DVD's came out and flat screens started showing up.
That's because standard TV resolutions hadn't changed a bit since the NTSC standards were put in place in the early '50s. It was only with the rise of digital that things started to get shaken up.
It started with the LP sized Lazer Disk. I can rem watching Star Trek (wanna say it was III) in a department store, the disk was rather beautiful, I rem hitting the Eject Button and this glorious shiny rainbow reflecting thing smoothly slid out.
I remember VHS being pretty bad, but I usually recorded in SLP mode to fit three movies onto one cassette. Years later I dubbed a DVD onto VHS in short play mode using a combo DVD/VCR unit, and the quality was far better than anything I'd ever watched on VHS in the past.
1. No one thought what we were watching was “bad” in real time. It was revolutionary tech. Hindsight. 2. It’s amazing that you chose this film. When I talk about certain movies I’d PREFER to watch on VHS, BTTF is at the top.
I used to just love smelling the inside of the clear plastic cover on the white plastic Disney movies boxes talk about a gateway drug weed has helped me cope
It makes sense because the MCA/Universal Home Video pressing of BTTF was from 1994, the same year Jurassic Park made its home video debut. I had that same VHS copy before I upgraded to the 2002 DVD BTTF Trilogy Pack
I remember the times when grandpa use to make me sit and manually rewind movies because he would say that the companies would intentionally make rewinders fast to break the film and ruin the VHS so u would have to buy more.
As a kid in the 80s, growing up on VHS, as bad as they were at times, getting many from Blockbuster that people didn't rewind, especially the fuzzy while recording over them over and over and using the tracking, I still miss them. I still have a few tapes in 2021. They had charm, throw them around and wouldn't get damaged unlike Blu ray. They were bulky but loved them. It's a shame they no longer are seen much and world moved on from them mostly except finding them in thrift stores, yard sales, or select places. VHS will always hold a special place in my heart.
Block Buster was awesome. Going to the store, arguing with your parents over the wildly overpriced snacks. As a kid, it was exciting seeing all those tapes on display and picking one out. There's just something about actually handling all the boxes that you don't get picking with movies on prime.
That's true, because then a copy of a movie was really special. I remember when I got Toy Story as a kind. I watched it, rewinded it, and watched it again. Nowadays we are overloaded with movies throught netflix and prime
we rented moviebox (vhs unit in transportable bag with handle) and chuck norris movies. if you notice at home that the previous renter hadn't reversed the tape you would rant about it. after watching a movie me and my brother would ask who of us that got to reverse the vhs tape. we also competed with switching channels on the tv, mind you sweden had only 2 channels. the whole family watched tv and movies together.
I still find vhs cool. I remember when I was a kid watching a movie was more like a ritual than todays routine of clicking a file or taping a screen. It was a special time
I remember the first VHS film on a machine in 1981 Superman 2 . At the time I was on rough times and still owned a B/W tv and color was nice to watch but this made me think of all the movies and tv shows I would buy when I got mine which wasnt till 1986 and that vhs machine cost $300 steep for the time . Bought it at Wards on monthly charges .
Me too, it's fun getting some friends together and watching a VHS movie on an old TV. There's just something inherently fun about experiencing old tech with your friends, especially if you have some nostalgia attached.
I still record new footage to VHS for nostalgia and convenience. Sometimes I record an entire season of shows from Netflix to a single tape and watch it off the tape.
My brother had his first VHS player and we used to watch Wayne’s World over and over, the tracking used to go out so bad and we had to hit the machine to get it to work again. Great times.
5 years is the difference between someone who is at their high school prom and someone who is a new hire at Goldman Sachs, has a Masters degree in a combined program, or a Sergeant(E-5) in the US Army or an Officer O-1!
When i was 12 years old. A whole Universe of films opened up for me to be able to watch on both Betamax and VHS, any time i wanted to. My mother worked at a video rental shop and i was also allowed to go and sit up stairs in the shop and watch all the latest releases before they were even available for customers to rent. VHS played a huge part in my childhood.
@@adventureguy4119 my mum died about 4 years ago. When i went back to attend the funeral and help clear her belongings, she still had a ton of old VHS video's stored in boxes, including a load of promotional tapes. She was watching and enjoying the tapes until the end.
@@mightymightyironhead My condolences to your family for your mother. I grew up in late 1980s Yugoslavia (born in Australia though) and I grew up on VHS as my uncle had access to bootleg tapes. I still use VHS to this day (still have three working VCRs which I keep clean by using cleaning cassettes and isopropyl alcohol cleaning fluid). Your memories with your mother are special - cherish them dearly.
The halo around Marty's head in the "original 1985 VHS" is an epplied effect called edge enhancement. It was meant to make the picture look sharper. It probably looks better on a CRT.
You also need to consider that CRTs are fundamentally different from LCDs, so the original tapes you had were optimised for smoother displays with low colour gamuts. Also because your capture format uses interlacing, you are getting a lot of artifacts in your final results that wouldn't exist on the CRT. This video explains more: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-V8BVTHxc4LM.html
Not just that but the crt you have makes the difference. 20” and below are perfect for vhs. Anything above that really isn’t ideal. Another thing is cables. My vcr has svideo and component out which are lightyears ahead of composite and rf.
You also remember the humongous(for the time) 36" CRT TV being the holy grail of entertainment. 36" and 2 billion pounds(sure felt like it) of pure, grainy entertainment.
ya the shift in technology isnt noticed when its progress forward, tv always looked presentable as it evolved, but going back in time you could see how poor it really was. as a kid i grew up on married with children for example. watching it as it aired all episodes "looked" the same. but rewatching them now you can see the quality changes over each season. i think the same applies to mono sound in tv vs stereo. the change wasnt super noticable unless you had the better equipment and watched some media of lower tech. i think we can all agree when we flipped to digital broadcast the change was so big its impossible to go back. sparking the decades of "remastered" media to make watching tolerable. i do miss snow tho. was so much easier to watch a tv show with a little static than as it is now, where any loss of signal turns into a blocky unwatchable mess.
Joe Mieszczur Well only 1920eds film reel work on the moon so NASA can,t go back 😋 but robots on Mars have such limitations so you need such robots to help you with your blocks
My thoughts exactly! I don't recall sitting there thinking, "Oh, man, this really sucks!" while watching a VHS tape. However, something that I did notice was how easily VHS tapes and VCRs could be worn out.
They just take a lot of space. I still remember visiting a media lab in my college library, waiting for an attendant to walk into closed stacks, open a vertical drawer of tapes, pulling out my movie and assigning me and my friends to a room. Solo individual had a personal station. I'm so glad I got to experience that.
I also got to work in that same library a couple years later while we digitized and sent everything to storage while the lab itself was torn apart and redesigned as offices and study rooms.
The only bad memories I have about VHS are when the tape had finally gone bad. Apart from that, I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "as bad as _we_ remember".
@@robertmcmahon4549 Yes. If there's one tv show that would need to be rebooted, it's Max. They'd just have to change the tv stations into social media outlets. It would work now just as fine as it worked back then, maybe even better, with all the 80s nostalgia and dystopian cyberpunk craze going on.
VHS was awesome ! We cared about content not image quality. I miss the whole ritual of going to the videostore and having friends come over to watch movies.
I agree. Hey remember when McDonalds would sell movies. I remember buying Back to the future for like 6 bucks new. I forgot what other movies were sold but I think it was a deal with Universal so they only sold movies from them.
Hello there and greetings. You guys must also be from a place we called the 90s. Where times were simpler. The world while not perfect seemed a lot more pleasant. And human beings actually interacted with each other. If you guys know how to go back there could you let me know?
Had a lot of good times with VHS. More than the years with DVDs 📀. Recorded so much stuff in the 80’s-90’s and liked the boxes better. Was fun while it lasted!
VHS machines were built like tanks when they first came out, by the time they were going out they were made incredible cheap as were the VHS cassettes. If you have old cassettes from the early 80's you'll be surprised at how heavy they are compared to cassettes from the early 2000's.
The old VCRs were heavy as they were full of individual components. Latter ones were far more integrated and therefore lighter. The older ones were not more reliable.
I do, and yes they're quite a bit heavier compared to VHS cassettes from the early 2000's. However, there are some improvements in the newer ones and I think it's safe to say they're not much worse terms of video quality, perhaps even better.
Thanks, that's a cool fact. I have about 250 VHS tapes laying around, and I noticed how some tapes are a lot heavier than others, even though their runtime is shorter. Never thought about how they developed them lighter over time.
can i ask what piece of kit you used to get the signal from your laptop to the vcr as i have been looking everywhere and can only find hdmi to scart (digital not composite) converter, fingers crossed 🤞 you could solve this problem for me. d;0)
Nothing but love for VHS. It’s probably (well, almost definitely) nostalgia talking, but adore the watching a film on tape days. Also, recording live TV and making tapes of favourite shows was something that modern tech doesn’t capture - recording fave shows on a digital box isn’t the same as making compilation tapes.
In the old days, you could record a TV show for a friend or neighbour and give them the tape. In the late 90s I actually traded tapes with people far away - I copied and sent my rare recordings and they sent me theirs. Can't do that now - there's no easy way to get the recording off the digital TV box!
Once in a while i still use my vcr. For some reason i just love the old pixelated picture it gives off its more nostalgic than anything for me. Plus i love watching the old previews before the movie started and i love the physical feel of vhs tapes over dvds. I was using my vcr alot to watch the old Disney movies before disney + came out.
I have no memory of it being bad at all. In fact, my memory is that it looked great. We always remember quality by what our impressions were of it at the time unless you're a certain comic book store owner.
I owned one. It saved wear and tear on the much more expensive player, and worked much faster. Biggest problem with mine was it was cheap, and broke after not a huge amount of use. Another advantage was you could pop in another tape and play it immediately without waiting for the rewind to happen.
The rewinder is a must have during that time. Saves times and prolong your VCR life from mechanical failures. I've the cheap one that did not have any counter in it, so it can't be used to (re-)wind the tapes into specific 'play back time'.
Fun fact: PAL composite's signal is far more superior when it comes to color. MUCH less coloring artifacts, more detail and can even handle teletext. (just to add up, lol) Even we've got 50 FPS, it's just better looking through composite. What's up with NTSC colors? Most of old recordings has incredibly wrong colors.
PAL has more bandwidth to store colors since it was designed after color video was introduced. NTSC had to pigeonhole the colors into to pre-existing B&W setup. It lead to a whole bunch of NTSC oddities, buy they were implemented so that everything would be backwards compatible on pre-color TV sets.
ya, i used to play the PSOne and PS2 games on CRT with Composite in early 2000's. The PAL games (especially Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec) looked much better in PAL compared to the NTSC.
Nerd alert - actually VHS did record the chroma and luminance separately, it's just that on a standard VHS recorder they were combined back to composite before being brought out to the rear panel. If you had an S-VHS machine, this would have an S-Video terminal on the rear, which gave a much-improved picture even when playing a standard VHS recording. As is also pointed out in the video, the VCR used was a fairly low-end machine. It would be interesting to do a test like this using a high-end VHS machine such as the JVC HR-D725 (from 1985) or HR-S6700 (from 2001). This would be fairer to the VHS format itself, although not many people had high-end VCRs like this. Also worth pointing out that here in Europe, the PAL system has a higher bandwidth than NTSC. Whilst this makes for better quality broadcast pictures (but note that our frame rate is 50 rather than 60), it also shows up the limited bandwidth of VHS much more than NTSC. For example, PAL VCRs didn't have the EP mode, only SP and LP, as reducing down to EP mode would have made the picture unwatchable with the higher bandwidth requirements of PAL. A good test of a VCR's quality was how good the picture was in the PAL LP mode - on my Ferguson 3V43 (a re-badged JVC HR-D725) it was pretty good, whereas on my much later S-VHS machine (a Philips VR-1000, also a re-badged JVC HR-S6700) the LP picture was pretty poor on standard VHS. The VR-1000 did feature digital noise reduction and a timebase corrector however, which makes it excellent for transferring SP recordings to DVD.
I still love VHS and there’s a growing community of people that dub the new movies like The Joker and John Wick onto old tapes. They even make custom card sleeves with original artwork on them. Oddly, they can get pretty expensive but a lot of work goes into making them.
I actually never had any bad memories of VHS... only good ones. On my TV I had back in the day, watching cable or a VHS had no discernible difference. Good memories of going to blockbuster or Hollywood video, being able to pop a tape in and record anything I wanted, being able to connect camcorders to and transfer it onto a full sized tape to be played anywhere... and the list goes on. I actually feel there has not been any technology in modern times that could offer that much convenience as VHS tapes.
True, but the feeling was different. See something I liked, pop a tape in and press record. Watch it later. With camcorders nowadays, sometimes people want it on bluray, DVD, or online. All of those formats require transcoding. Back then, plug the camera into the VCR, press record, and share. Do edits on dedicated equipment later if desired.
I’m guessing Nostalgia is somewhat blinding you on the past. VHS wasn’t a perfect format & the introduction of DVDs demonstrated that the public was asking more than what VHS could offer by the turn of the millennium.
I love my VHS tapes and machines. I still watch them and record shows to this day, mostly because certain shows you just can't get otherwise. And certain movies I can't find in their original forms on DVD, like the Original Star Wars trilogy.
Yea. Hell that's why I bought the Original Trilogy on vhs a couple of months ago. I rather watch Star Wars that way because that gives me a more warm nostalgic feeling plus all the cgi on my Blu Rays are complete eyesores
One of the reasons the purchased tape looks worse is because the actual tape you bought would vary in quality, EVEN IF IT WAS NEW. Why? Because of how VHS tapes were made. (This was hinted at at the 8:55 mark) They literally have a master tape play and dupe that signal to thousands of other VHS recordings. But that master tape used to make dupes only has a finite amount of plays until the signal gets progressively worse. You would then toss that 'master' tape and replace it. If one of the VHS copies you bought was near the end of the life of the master... it would be even worse. As an example, I was an absolute NUT for the Lion King when it came out in 1995. I bought it three times on VHS. Each one of those copies had varying quality played back on the same equipment. Which is what you would expect, considering that was the most duped VHS title in history for mass production.
Back in the 80's and even 90's when you took a tape or DVD home, you were committed to watching it, and to some extent, more grateful and attentive to the content on screen. Now we can easily abandon ship if we don't like the way a movie is going in the first 10 or 15 minutes and sometimes cheat ourselves out of a good movie without knowing it. Also, with the digital workflow being much more accessible than film to video, everyone is making movies and the market is oversaturated with poor filmmaking. Just food for thought.
While I think I see what you're saying, I don't think I can agree. I had a lot of tapes that were recorded for me, due to not having cable, and they weren't just disposable content. In fact, sometimes we would watch the same recorded show or movie over and over, and FF through parts we didn't want. It was easier than when we would copy/bootleg/share music on cassettes! But maybe I just never had a great cassette player that would give me time marks! Loved VHS back then, but wouldn't trade it for streaming and saving shows/movies today!
It's the same situation with all digitally created, and shared entertainment content now. There's an insane excess of youtube videos, podcasts, and soundcloud rappers all with Patreon accounts.
Are you all special? Those formats (except for BetaMax) were rarely used in comparison to VHS. BetaMax could have been better quality than VHS had Sony used larger cassettes with more tape that would have allowed them to use the Beta 1 speed, but that speed was removed from most BetaMax VCRs by the early 80s. Thus, BetaMax was equal in quality (except for the ability to have somewhat better color and sharper background images) to VHS. U-Matic, another Sony format, was primarily and almost exclusively used for broadcasts. They were incredibly rare VCRs in regards to being used for home video purposes. CED, on the other hand, was unbelievably minuscule in the market, which is why it was discontinued in the mid 80s. Ask almost 99.5% or more of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and Generation X and you’ll find that they will have never even heard the word “CED”. Not to mention the fact that NONE of those formats are HD.
I recently acquired a Samsung VCR/DVD-R combo that outputs at 1080i through HDMI (there's also a subsequent model that outputs at full 1080p). I'd be interested to see this comparison repeated with one of those machines. I have to say, while watching some of my old recorded broadcasts, I was shocked to find that it looked better than I remembered. It varied with the differences between SP and SLP a LOT more than I expected but overall I was surprised.
I have the 1080p version. In my opinion I think VHS looks worse over HDMI than AV. I think HDMI allows you to see more flaws in the image than AV. However, most of the tapes I have I got from thrift stores and eBay, so I'm sure they had been played quite a lot. The DVD playback is great though it does a good job at upscaling the picture.
@@porkermurns7590 You know it might be down to my display. I'm using an old Samsung plasma as my main display. One of the reasons I bought it at the time was for how well it handled standard def material. It's not perfect, of course, but the HDMI signal gets rid of the color-bleed and inherent noise from an analog RCA signal. But you still have the sub-par, almost monochromatic, color at times. And flickering.
I remember, once vhs had pretty long movies and it was a long enough and popular enough movie, there would be a ton of previews, I mean, a lot more than normal. You would seem to get extended previews every so often. It felt a lot more like being in a theatre.
@@FrightfulAccountant Indeed, and most VHS releases in Europe were usually also completely uncut... So many DVD releases of the same movies are horribly cut or censored, even when the box says "uncut", it really isn't compared to the VHS version, especially not for horror movies. You took a wise decision in keeping the VHS collection (sadly, i was stupid enough to sell most of mine in the mid 00s, before i started to really notice how many scenes were missing from the DVD releases). Also in my opinion, nothing can beat old slashers on VHS, no matter what...the sound, even if it's supposedly worse quality, just does em so much more justice on VHS, and defects/gltiches just add to the atmosphere (same goes for the blurry picture, there's just something to it).
I remember getting one of those tvs with a vhs player inside it as a kid and thinking it was one of the coolest things ever lol. I think one of the few problems I had was having to rewind every movie after watching it.
I still regularly work with VHS in 2023; capturing old analog recordings to digital format. That bit at 1:26 when you were cleaning the head drum with a Q-tip triggered me though; I was taught NEVER to clean the video heads like that. Not only do you risk damaging the heads (and you can't easily get new ones), but fibres from the Q-tip can lodge in the heads and be extremely difficult to remove! I had to trash my 1995 VCR after doing that...
If you have the right equipment, they can actually look pretty good. I’m not saying that it’s great, I’m just saying that it’s not that bad. Don’t just assume that “VHS doesn’t look half bad” means “oMG VhS Is bETTer thAN 4K XD”.
It doesn't. Now, after it's been played 10,000 times, or if it's old or otherwise damaged, than it does lose it's clarity. Personally, I don't mind at all watching a 70s Clint Eastwood movie from a videotape. I like that old-school feeling. It doesn't have to be Blue-ray or even regular DVD. Why do you think people still buy and/or collect LPs or cassettes? It's Nostalgic.
They look better if you've got an old CRT to hook your VHS player up to. My old VHS copy of The Blues Brothers is older than I am, but hooked up to the 32 inch Sony Trinitron we watched TV on when our even older one (with wooden fucking panelling!) was killed by a power surge, it looks pretty good. Hook it up to the 60 inch plasma screen however, and I have to turn it off, it all depends on what equipment it's using, you've got to use equipment the format was meant to be played on.