The last VHS machines

[ppppenguin]

VHS machine are no longer being made: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36857370

I've got 3 or 4 stashed away for when they're needed to play old tapes.

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
Although I repaired many thousands of video recorders from the N1500 through VHS, Beta & Video 2000 I was never impressed with the quality of the standard machines, worse than 405 by far. The SVHS and Super Beta were of course far better but the electro mechanical nature of any of the machines simply made them unreliable.
I was more than happy to see their demise. DVD has it's troubles too as does HDD recording, no format will ever be perfect but to me VCR's were a pain and I am sorry but am glad to see them go.

[AlanBeckett]

Back in the late '70s, when we were particularly impecunious, we rented a Colour TV and VCR. I think it was some sort of combined 'Deal'. If I remember rightly the VCR was a Thorn VideoStar - is that how it's spelled? I don't know who actually made it but that was undoubtedly the best VCR we ever had. Its most impressive feature was its 'Stop Frame' which really worked - no tearing or half Bandwidth, it just worked. In the '80s when we moved House and had a few bob we bought our own, but they were never as good.

Alan

[peter scott]

I was more than happy to see their demise. DVD has it's troubles too  no format will ever be perfect but to me VCR's were a pain and I am sorry but am glad to see them go.

I very rarely use VHS now but over the years I've found DVD recorders and players to be very much more troublesome than VHS ever was.

Peter

[Nick]

I was more than happy to see their demise. DVD has it's troubles too  no format will ever be perfect but to me VCR's were a pain and I am sorry but am glad to see them go.

I very rarely use VHS now but over the years I've found DVD recorders and players to be very much more troublesome than VHS ever was.

Disagree - VHS recorders were very poorly designed - DVD is much better.

For a start, bearing in mind how close these typically were to the floor, a small child could easily get a sausage into a VHS recorder - nigh on impossible with a DVD... Lord alone knows they tried...

[ppppenguin]

The basic picture quality of VHS (and Betamax for that matter) was poor but it was the best that could be done at the time for a reasonable cost. The public didn't seem to mind. SVHS was an improvement but never took off in a big way. VHS sound was greatly improved later.

DVD started with a much better picture quality, provided the programme makers didn't push the data compression too hard. DVD does have downsides. The lifetime of recordable discs is poor, much worse than typical VHS tapes where even old tapes are still usually playable. The whole business of regional coding and forcing you to sit through copyright notices did nothing to endear the format to users.

Dubbing VHS to DVD is fine for viewing but not for archiving. Ordinary "spinning rust" hard drives are cheap and reliable. A 1TB HDD will hold the equivalent of over 200 DVDs for under £50. What's more you can clone it with ease to give extra backup.

[Nick]

Ah, I've ripped all my CDs to a tiny Vortexbox with a 1TB SSD in FLAC (lossless) format - the 3.5" SSD holds 2500 CDs with no loss of quality...

Putting all our home videos on there too!

[Murphyv310]

The basic picture quality of VHS (and Betamax for that matter) was poor but it was the best that could be done at the time for a reasonable cost. The public didn't seem to mind. SVHS was an improvement but never took off in a big way. VHS sound  was greatly improved later.

DVD started with a much better picture quality, provided the programme makers didn't push the data compression too hard. DVD does have downsides. The lifetime of recordable discs is poor, much worse than typical VHS tapes where even old tapes are still usually playable. The whole business of regional coding and forcing you to sit through copyright notices did nothing to endear the format to users.

Dubbing VHS to DVD is fine for viewing but not for archiving. Ordinary "spinning rust" hard drives are cheap and reliable. A 1TB HDD will hold the equivalent of over 200 DVDs for under £50. What's more you can clone it with ease to give extra backup.

Hi.
Jeffrey you're reply is a peach.
I have often wondered at the life of various media.

The shellac recording has to be the longest surviving, the production must be in the billions and the survival rate has to be high. I have many from the first decade of the 20th century and half a dozen from the 19th century, all play fine and one 19th century disc was never played before I acquired it! So long as they are not broken they "usually" play.

Tape can deteriorate, you get print through it gets sticky, stretches, can be ruined by magnetic fields and has yet to see if it can last as long as shellac, this also applies to VCR formats.

Vinyl records can be long lived too, they don't shatter like shellac but are far less robust in other areas. They can warp, melt and the groove is easily ruined by misuse. Their survival rate should be good so long as they are stored and used sensibly.

CD's are known to deteriorate, some of the discs from the early 80's no longer play, corrosion of the alloy substrate is the biggest problem, later discs are supposed to be better but only time will tell. Recordable media (CD-R/RW DVD R etc) are well known to have a limited life and even if the manufacturers try to tell you they can last 100 years how would they know? Lab tests and real life are two different things!

Minidisc............. Possibly the peach, Sony made a very clever disc, with a shutter that protects the disc from corrosive finger chemicals, a system that brings the alloy surface to a temperature that allows the over-write head to leave a lasting mechanical change to the "groove" in the disc, I use the word groove not in its real sense, the disc itself has a track like a CD but is far more robust and protected from light, UV, moisture finger chemicals etc and is robust. I'd like to see if this media will last 100 years +, I have a sneaky feeling it will!

HDD, electro mechanical, we all know how often they fail............. I'm sure we all have stories from ourselves and friends. How many will survive 100 years and retain their data?

Solid state memory devices............... Who knows, my feeling is they will be poor, I'm no expert but in 100 years can anyone think they will retain their data?

To me shellac will be number 1, Minidisc and Vinyl will be a close second.

[ppppenguin]

HDDs are very reliable when not used heavily. One that's sitting on a shelf should have a very long life. Even when spinning they're good, provided they're kept cool-ish and not exercised too hard. Heavily used servers wear out their HDDs a lot faster than ordinary PCs. It's also the only inexpensive medium that's both big and easy to clone. Minidiscs may be reliable but they hold very little data. Shellac and vinyl can't be cloned and can only be copied with effort.

Once you have your data on a HDD it's trivial to clone it and keep a copy or copies elsewhere. Use different makes of HDD to avoid systematic manufacturing faults.

Flash cannot be regarded as archival. Not USB sticks, not SD cards, not SSDs. 10 years max data retention. Highly convenient for many things but not suitable for stuff you want to keep.

One significant risk with all modern formats is the technology to read them in 50+ years time. Look at the problems with reading old tape formats etc now. Not just recovering the bits and bytes, but their meaning when we've long forgotten what .DOC etc are.

[Mark Hennessy]

I'm pleased to say that I've not met the CD-rot phenomena myself, and I've got a lot of CDs. Reports at work are extremely rare as well - even in Archives (though they mostly deal with copying CDRs before they fail, along with DAT tapes and any other obscure, obsolete formats you can imagine).

I wonder if defects in the thin top layer are a factor, so if you've handled the discs carefully, perhaps that reduces the odds of it happening. Occasionally you can see pinholes in the aluminium layer, but these are usually well below the size that the ECC can cope with, so a non-issue.

I also like MD. Had CDRs not emerged when they did, MD would have been even more successful. Naturally, commercially pressed MDs were produced in the same was as CD, so aluminium corrosion might well have been a problem for them - but if my careless handling theory holds any water, then the plastic case will obviously help. But if the rot is caused by manufacturing problems, then yes, MD and CD would be comparable. Back in the day, pre-recorded MDs were relatively rare, and I don't recall them being any cheaper than CDs, so I just kept buying CDs... The only pre-recorded MDs I have came free with my in-car player - a compilation and a Jamiroquai album...

MD was popular in broadcast for a while. Not the most reliable, sadly. Expensive "pro" machines were only slightly better than domestic decks in our experience (ignoring the well-known problems with the JE500/510 mechs). If you knocked an MD machine when recording, that would send the laser off in the wrong direction, and if the TOC failed to write, that would trash the entire disc. These days, flash recorders and computers rule.

I don't miss VHS. Tape based, with all the problems of access and wear/tear/damage, plus a poorly conceived format to begin with. The quality might've been good enough for the majority, but the minority were short-changed (as usual). Some machines did an OK job - I was always impressed with the pictures from the various Philips machines (though the less said about the mechanisms the better!). Panasonic had some good moments too - I love the FS-88 machines with their wonderfully engineered die-cast G-deck and S-VHS abilities (I've never had a moments trouble from a G deck, but I know that some hated them!). Still have a couple here. S-VHS just upped the luminance bandwidth, but did nothing to improve on the terrible chroma performance, unfortunately. Today, if I plug up the machine, it'll most likely be to enjoy some vintage teletext!

Unfortunately, as soon as you get to play with a pro format (Betacam SP in my case), domestic machines just look silly by comparison. Although Sony pro mechanisms weren't much better than their domestic equivalents. I soon learnt that while Sony can get a lot of things right, tape handling - any format at any price - was not their forte