We bought our first two Beta-Maxes, one new and one used, in 1978.

One of 'em (I think it was a Zenith) had metal piano keys on top.

We must still have hundreds of Beta tapes, and I bought a Sony Super Beta Max off Flea-bay to watch 'em a few years back, but it gets little use, since I am always on the internet, and the wife likes to channel-surf, lol.

We also have two VHS machines, each bought -I dunno, within the last 15 years- that as well get little use, a Panasonic and a Sharp.

Beta always had the superior picture though.

Wow im sorry... That wasnt common back then i dont think for stuff to give out so soon :(

Not really that uncommon to wear out heads. Those old mechanisms would go many more hours than the heads might last. I used to replace a lot of VCR head assemblies back in the heyday. Ordered a lot of them from a company called ASTI Magnetics (which surprizingly is still in business) aftermarket at a fraction of the OEM price so the repair cost would be affordable, and performance as good or better than original.

Yes i imagine it would be if better stuff was put in :)

This one was made in 1984, so 27 years old when 2011 hits.

I still use VHS but I'm starting to have second thoughts. The machines I get always turn to crap on me or were crap to begin with. Then, when I go to try to fix them, I only make them worse.

I once had an 1984 JVC top loader that had major problems. I only got it to play a tape once before it popped fuses and got a tape stuck in it. I then got an early 90's RCA VCR that lasted a couple of years and then something broke inside, I opened it up and it literally crumbled in my hands. I then got a free from craigslist late 80's Hitachi made Sears branded VCR. It worked great and had a great picture to boot. A couple months back I decided to give it a head clean so I popped in my cleaning cassette and it nearly ruined the picture quality. I used Q-tips and some rubbing alcohol to bring it back to how it was before. A second Q-tip cleaning later on killed it.

Now, I just have a late 90's Philips Magnavox VCR that has some quirks of its own. It displays a pretty grainy picture, most likely from a previous attempt to clean it with Q-tips and alcohol but at least it records and plays tapes!!!

I still believe in my VCR's . I can buy brand new blank tapes 3 for a buck at the thrifts. I don't fool around with any Funai built units. The 2000 or newer units that seem the best are Sanyo, Sony and RCA/GE. Pre 2000 Panasonic with the cast aluminum decks are the only ones that seem to hold up well.

None of these I can recommend. The Sanyo would be made by LG, Sony would be made by Samsung, and RCA/GE would be made by Daewoo or Samsung. In my opinion, the best and most reliable VCR made in the new era is the 2002 and newer Mitsubishi units, such as HS-U449, HS-U749, HS-HD1100U, and HS-HD2000U.

Well unfortunately my old sony top loader died and it was beyond my means to fix it and the repair shop guy just laughed at such an old beast. So I picked up a pair of modern modern ones. Another sony and a phillips-magnavox. Well it keeps me from having to rebuy all my movies on dvd and well, i get a bit nostalgic for popping in a tape, rather than a dvd.

Just recently bought a front loader sony super hi-fi betamax player for reasons even i dont understand. Though now im searching on ebay for tapes, to actually test it.

But id like to keep these old babies working for as long as possible. If for any other reason, it was interesting to see my 6 year old nephew wonder over the vhs tapes. Its odd to know that he has never seen them before.

This page tells the truth about DVD and VHS quality audio/video (Which i think is much better)

http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001...12921.289.html

Whoever wrote that mentioned "vertical resolution" but failed to mention horizontal resolution (i.e., video bandwidth or frequency response) which is the important "spec" since NTSC is fixed with 525 vertical lines. Standard VHS reproduces 250 lines horiz resolution (or about 3 mHz video bandwidth or frequency response) at best, likewise Beta. DVD has a video bandwidth out to over 6 mHz. equal to 480 horiz lines. Both VHS and Beta downconvert the chroma which kills the color resolution into color blurs superimposed onto the b&w image. S-VHS and ED-Beta achieved up to 5-6 mHz video equal over 400 horiz lines but they still downconverted the chroma. S-VHS/ ED-Beta at their optimum, and with time base corrrection, can certainly look about as good as a DVD.

But they sound MUCH BETTER than DVD! (I have many movies i am grateful to have on VHS :) (Recorded in the 80s)) you can hear and see the difference!! (@ least i can)

Well that's certainly debatable too. VHS Hi Fi sounds excellent when all's right, but can have artifacts in the audio like head switching noise, tape path misalignment noise, and varying noise floor from the compander noise reduction Hi Fi uses to get the s/n down to a low level. But it's sure a hell of a lot better than the linear stereo tracks (mono track split in two) Hi Fi replaced before that stereo format got too far.

I have plenty of examples of DTS and Dolby Digital that are incredible audio quality wise. Several music albums released in multichannel DVD-A, DTS and Dolby Digital. Funny that writer prefers old 2-channel Dolby Surround which as I recall was derived from their early QS-SQ matrix surround. Heck I still have a Sansui QSD-1 4 channel synthesizer-decoder circa about 1976 set up for 4 channel listening but things have improved greatly since.

Maybe someone believed that article when it was written in 2001, but in 2011 it is a joke. VHS in a "home theater"?

The one thing they got right may be the name of the Web site itself, "adequacy". Home theater is about excellence, not adequacy.

Yes its stupid....

They are losing quality and dont care...... I am a purist,I PREFER QUALITY!!

hi-here a cool Pioneer beta vcrhttp://img331.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/u...t26bv24732.jpghttp://img331.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/u...ct1ox24732.jpg

I dont see why you think the page is a joke.....

VHS is analog and ANALOG HAS ALWAYS BEEN NICER!! (The sound is nicer and a true analog picture is quite nice too!!)

I have cable and DirecTV so i have to look @ compromised video and its horrible! (Sound isnt as natural sounding either (compromised) (I dont care to watch much of it to be quite frank with you about it!))

Also I would rather watch movies I have loved ALL MY LIFE in the same analogue format I have always loved them in! (I want them to look/sound EXACTLY THE SAME) I want them to be THE BEST THEY CAN BE and its sad this digital crap has infested our world.... Its total garbage!!


Its sad today: People are satisfied with LESS and its quite sad.........

I still use my VHS, and have a bunch of movies that I watch from time to time. Also there is always a good selection of cheap tapes at thrift stores, and lots of people just give away there collections. It a good way to get retro movies for cheap or even free. I used to repair lots of them when I was doing electronics repair as an income, and generally all they required was cleaning, belts, idler tires, and an occasional plastic gear or some other little piece in the tape mechanism. Occasionally I had to replace/ re cap switch mode supplies in the "newer models".

The single scratch ruining a disc argument in that article is complete rubbish, but the rest is fairly accurate.

I'll add the following arguments to the topic to stimulate thought. Because DVDs are compressed the video compression usually has a threshold for how small of motion it will capture...This reduces noise, but also causes problems like causing a smooth pan to become choppy, and causing a distant characters mouth not to move on some words or not move at all after compression. basically reducing motion resolution.

One thing to keep in mind is that regular VHS has resolutions below that of the NTSC standard so a properly mastered DVD will likely have more resolution on a stationary image and possibly less noise. This can be noticeable even if your TV is a NTSC unit as mine are, especially if it is one of the higher performance models.

Both methods have their drawbacks, but I rather average noise in my head than deal with compression artifacts. Another thing to consider is that there are better analog formats than VHS. S-VHS, LaserDisc, SuperBetamax, ED Betamax, and W-VHS all have better resolution than regular VHS, and in the case of W-VHS analog HD resolutions were the goal of the design!

When it comes to prerecorded stuff analog may never be fully displaced in my entertainment system. Though it has been displaced in my archiving of broadcast programs. Since DVD-Rs are cheaper than tape(and easier to find), smaller, and all broadcast material I can get is hopelessly compressed anyway so the main advantage of tape is not achievable....It is interesting to go back to before the compression was so egregious and compare my early DVD recordings of TV shows to the S-VHS-ET recordings I made. I literally ran a DVD recorder and a VCR and taped the same thing on two different formats for a while before deciding DVD better served the purpose. S-VHS in SP is virtually indistinguishable from DVD as far as resolution of material recorded off a cable TV source...S-VHS is especially hard to distinguish from the cable source since it lacks the added compression artifacts of DVD.

Oh yeah, my store rocks for tape selection. I haven't watched any of mine yet, both of my VCRs are getting re-belted first. I have the Sharp VC-581C and a Hitachi-built RCA VMT285. One of the best things about working at that store, I don't have to deal with flakes not answering emails as I did with the online classifieds. Also, a lot of them wouldn't hold an item until I could get there on the bus even if it was a free give. At the store, it's just find, buy, done. The prices are a lot better too. I'd rather pay a nominal fee for something I want than deal with those online flakes.

I still record TV shows on VHS. So much easier than DVDs. I've had DVDs mess up and not record the show. Never an issue with VHS.

Combo units are great also. They are very difficult to find as newer recorders are taking over.

I record shows that I want to keep that are on the hard drive of my Directv receiver to VHS. It won't let me copy anything to DVD from the hard drive, but I can record them from the VHS to DVD with no problem.

I hope they come home soon buddy!

Did ya ever get that movie I found for ya in the other thread??

I forgot, what movie is that?

This one bud :)

http://www.videokarma.org/showthread...03#post3087303

Ah, gotcha. I hadn't followed that thread beyond my post. Thanks for that link. I'm hoping it will show up at my shop, but that seems unlikely.

Obviously, Hollywood blockbusters are not my thing.

I thihk your quite lucky having a shop that collects VHS to sell!!

Analog sound and video can be fine, but it is not "always nicer" in my opinion, or the opinion of most people I know. Digital is not "always nicer", either.

You and I agree 100% here. Cable and especially satellite TV almost always look very lousy. It is their exact business model to do the maximum amount of digital compression they can get away with, without getting too many complaints from customers (but definitely accepting SOME amount of complaints as meaning "good enough").

Either that, OR
You cannot have both-those are opposites!

Technology does improve. Even late-release commercial VHS tapes looked mich better than the early 1980s releases of the same movies. But Blu-ray versions of almost any movie just completely blow away and crush ANY previous home-video version in every case that I have seen. I hope you have a chance to see a Blu-ray movie on a good high-definition display; it is really a wonderful experience to see the fine detail and full wide-screen picture exactly as the director intended theater-goers to see, but in your own home (or a friend's home). That does not mean you cannot enjoy movies or other programming in various analog formats; I do so here as well, primarily Laser Discs of many music-video releases that are not available on newer formats (or indeed do not look any better in a DVD version; it does happen!). One of these days, I will pull out some of my video tapes recorded in 1979-1990 and watch them, too. There is no point in trying to respond to such a comment.

I like the crisp picture of a DVD, but I have no problem watching VHS tapes. I grew up with VHS and still use it. I have hundreds of pre recorded movies, and still buy them. They are $.50 at the local thrifts and are plentiful. I don't record much anymore unless it is just something on TV that I want to watch later on.

I used to record from TV all the time, but now there isn't hardly anything on that I want to see. Nearly all of the movies I taped years ago have been replaced with DVDs, pre recorded tapes, and some downloads because the cable we had years had a very crappy picture.

i still use vhs ,and even cassetts in cars & truck, if isnt broke why fix it. we use everything dvd cds , hook the ipod to a 1966 floor model stereo , it all works together.

My main video recorder is a Panasonic VCR/DVD... have had it about 10 years I think... maybe more.

I also have an LG VCR/DVD recorder, but the DVD's dont always come out... you get halfway through recrording something and it tells you "you cant do this." Or, it gets to the end, finalizes the DVD, and then says ERROR. You might get lucky and find you can still play it.

So, I will continue to use my Panasonic because it seems to be bullet proof. Now and then, I will use the VCR in the LG just to keep the belts exercised.

Before my Panasonic, I had a Teac HIFI 4head VCR bought back in the early 90's... got ten years use out if it. I liked that machine.

Could it be macrovision messing it up?

I HATE MACROVISION!!

I have the movie HOUSE ARREST on VHS (HBO Video) and its got MACROVISION and looks like crap!!

I would LOVE finding a copy on VHS that was not by HBO video!! (Probably wouldnt have this garbage)

I have begun cataloguing my VHS collection, and currently have around 120 tapes.

My parents were clearing out their VHS tapes, so I gladly acquired tapes like the Beatles' Anthology (sadly not in optimal quality) and 12 hours of "Friday Night Videos" from 1982 to 1986.

I've just finished setting up a two-deck setup for recording short segments of particular tapes onto a separate tape - a sort of "best-of" compilation, if you will.

Just out of curiosity - does anyone know when the first VCRs with stereo RCA outputs came onto the market?

First stereo VCRs I recall, linear stereo, no stereo tuner, not Hi Fi, Panasonic PV-1780 and the PV-6000 portable and about 1983. I owned one of each. I have old MTV recordings I made on them in stereo, when the cable co. carried the stereo audio on an FM frequency around 88 mHz, and used the "simulcast" function of the VCR to record video from the cable box and audio from an FM tuner. First Hi Fi came 1984, still no MTS stereo tuner until late '84-85 models.

Also, when you do that, copy a tape to another, you lose another generation of quality. More video noise, wow and flutter, other artifacts of the process get added every time you copy.

Let me know when you're done with those. I have about 1,000 tapes tapes here you can go through! :D

Hey, it comes with the format...

Besides, it's better than rewinding and fast-forwarding 90 million times to find a certain clip. :yes:

If I remember right, Akai was the first to manufacture and sell stereo (VHS) VCRs, probably in 1981. As Ed said, they (and the others that followed) split the audio track space on a regular VHS tape into two halves to record in stereo, and they added Dolby noise reduction to help compensate for the half-size audio recording area. Later, Hi-Fi audio (audio multiplexed onto the video signal/recording area) came along, that blew away the linear sound quality.

Totally awesome! I still have all of my original Friday Night Videos recordings on Beta tapes from that same period.

That is how I made my Friday Night recordings, on a Sony Beta Hi-Fi VCR, with the stereo audio from the local FM radio station that transmitted the matching audio.

My hope is to someday bring my recordings into the 21st century, or at least the late 20th century, and copy each song video into an individual computer file. Then, I could either make DVDs with directly-accessible songs, or even make rearranged tapes if I ever want to play with that for fun. Or, just let a computer play them infinitely as desired with no further quality loss or wear. :)