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.
So, everyone is having a slapfight of confusion over the purposes VHS had.
For movies, people were ready as hell when DVD gained ground to change format. DVD has 10 years under VHS, especially when we thought Blu-Ray was going to kill DVD once and for all and when we thought streaming was going to kill it once and for all. But, DVD is going to easily outlast VHS in time. The difference being, VHS was literally ALL we had for its time and for its purpose. DVD, we fall back to because a lot of the other options, like streaming, sucks.
However, for camera and studio use, it took nearly longer, so there is a lot more reluctance.
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.
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.
By modern standards, VHS has plenty of advantages too. A corrupt portion of a computer file often means it won’t play at all, while a tape will just play apart from that section.
Audio and Video are always in sync with a tape - digital files are often out by up to a couple of seconds.
A tape is often more robust than a hard disk or a DVD too.
The only downsides of VHS that immediately spring to mind are quality (not that that mattered at the time - it was and is still good enough) physical space (not that I ever ran out of room) and speed of skipping to particular times, and speed of backup. Oh… and lack of togglable subtitles too (not that digital always has those either)
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.
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.
So, everyone is having a slapfight of confusion over the purposes VHS had.
For movies, people were ready as hell when DVD gained ground to change format. DVD has 10 years under VHS, especially when we thought Blu-Ray was going to kill DVD once and for all and when we thought streaming was going to kill it once and for all. But, DVD is going to easily outlast VHS in time. The difference being, VHS was literally ALL we had for its time and for its purpose. DVD, we fall back to because a lot of the other options, like streaming, sucks.
However, for camera and studio use, it took nearly longer, so there is a lot more reluctance.
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.
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.
By modern standards, VHS has plenty of advantages too. A corrupt portion of a computer file often means it won’t play at all, while a tape will just play apart from that section. Audio and Video are always in sync with a tape - digital files are often out by up to a couple of seconds. A tape is often more robust than a hard disk or a DVD too.
The only downsides of VHS that immediately spring to mind are quality (not that that mattered at the time - it was and is still good enough) physical space (not that I ever ran out of room) and speed of skipping to particular times, and speed of backup. Oh… and lack of togglable subtitles too (not that digital always has those either)
The other downside is, is if you play VHS enough time, you’ll get degraded quality by generation. Audio sync issues, video skipping and scattering.
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.