(Note: blockbuster has a 5 disk Phillips dvd player now $69, was $159.00)
One thing that I do like about vhs instead of dvd is that if you turn off the vcr, or take out the cassette, you still know just where you were in a film. A dvd player (most of them) forgets where you were. Some players have better navigation than others.
When you have both a VCR and a DVD player (and you are allowed to have both, you know), you can watch a movie, record TV shows, and then be able to watch your shows while zipping through the commercials. You can have friends over to watch movies on the night your favorite shows are on, and just record the shows to watch later.
You see, Priceguy, it’s not pushing out the old VCR tech… it’s adding to it. It’s an additional option that makes your entertainment system more versatile. Both technologies have their uses. I wouldn’t give up either right now.
Also, it’s now become inexpensive enough to produce DVDs that television shows can now archive entire seasons in affordable box sets, which don’t take up much shelf space. This has been attempted with videotape, but has never been very successful.
Not so. My Samsung player holds the last viewed sector in its memory. Most DVD players have that feature–it’s the cheap $50 units you’re talking about.
What I want to know is:
Why is that ultra uber 2 DVD Harry Potter limted edition with 18 additional scenes and voice activation (I kid you not) cost $18.99 and the latest Madonna CD with NO additional anything cost $16.99?
That’s just freakin wrong!
On additional note, just think how much you REALLY spend on a movie…lets take the Lord of the Rings as it’s a Really Big Target.
Realize you’ve spent $86 on the FIRST of THREE movies!
I suspect the LAST special edition of the series will be 20 DVD’s, bookends, action figures, and STING! (And it will be a bargain at only $249.99!
(And sell like hotcakes)
I agree with Priceguy. DVD has a lot of advantages, and none of them are big enough for me to consider replacing my VHS collection at this time. Once you can record on them cheaply (at this stage I still consider DVD an intermediate technology), I’ll consider it more carefully. VHS is adequate for my personal needs. I generally don’t enjoy or need the added features that come with DVDs. I don’t think storage issues will affect me for a long time. I have other things I’d rather spend money on at this point in my life.
Haven’t seen it mentioned yet but the biggest plus point for me, living in the UK, is I can get the original version of all the movies I want for the US or Asia and not have to sit through a version which has been censored for the UK market.
So many movies which I’ve got from the US have been censored in the UK & it drives me nuts (examples include Face/Off, Cliffhanger & The Phantom Menace so it isn’t just the gory, horror movies which get cut either).
Also, DVD combined with the internet has made it far, far easier to get a hold of foreign movies (assuming you have a region free setup of course). Televisions capable of displaying both a PAL & NTSC signal were quite rare until DVD came along and although this is just a guess, I’d say the proliferation of foreign material available on DVD had at least something to do with this.
Everything everyone else said, and plus, I don’t own a television. I live in a dorm room. My only appliances are a desk lamp, an alarm clock, and a computer. DVDs are perfect for people like me. Also consider trips and things where people take their laptops. So many people will already have computers for stuff besides watching movies, that a format that plays on computers is an advantage.
Sorry if this has been said already. It’s a long thread…
Why would anyone want to replace their collection? I have a DVD player. I still have all my VHS tapes, but any new movies that I purchase are on DVD. It’s a process of phasing out the old technology slowly, not supplanting it in one fell swoop. However, that’s what some people (notably, the OP) seem to think they’d have to do.
I mean, think back to when you got your first CD player. Did you just throw away your cassette player and replace all your casettes with CDs? Of course not. DVD should be treated the same way.
I don’t think things will end up quite the same as with VCRs. Instead recording directly to DVD, future techonolgy will probably have a DVD recorder coupled with some sort of set-top box with an internal harddrive. You could record anything you wanted internally, and burn to DVD the stuff that you want to transfer to another location.
Not really. But I will have to buy a DVD player once VHS is phased out of the market, if I want to watch new movies, and since I don’t want a DVD player and am happy the way it is, I’m annoyed at this. Also, the day my VCR goes bust and there are no new VCRs to buy, I’ll have to replace my collection. As for having both, it’d be a new machine (the place is cluttered enough as it is), a new remote control and so on.
People here are saying that the day VCRs are history is far, far away, and I certainly hope they’re right. Anyway, I have now learned that there will be combined VCR-DVD players with the capacity to copy VHS to DVD (and, presumably, the other way around too). Things are looking up.
I agree, DVD sucks. It is not enough of an improvement, mainly because I was expecting far better resolution. This Blu-Ray thing someone mentioned sounds interesting though. Is the resolution as good as D-VHS?
I have no doubt that’s right. VCR’s (despite their limitations) have some properties that are completely unavailable in any other format. The ability to tape a TV show and store it away is valuable, you cannot do this with DVD, or TiVo. It’s taken 20 years for recordable CDs to get popular, and most people only do them on computer. Audio tape players are still widely available, even though the format is not very popular.
I consider DVD to be as much of an advance in video as CD was in audio. At the snoozingly slow pace HDTV seems to be coming along, I doubt this DVD technology will go anywhere for quite a while.
Uh, tell that to my husband, who can’t figure out why I’m buying 3 times as many blank VHS tapes as before we got our Tivo. That’s because the Tivo records something, and I’ll decide I want to keep it, so I dub it off onto VHS. Because Tivo gets more, I want to dub more.
It’s so much easier to do now. Say a musical artist I was interested in was going to be on Leno. Before, I’d set a tape for Leno, adding on a little at the end in case the time went over. Then I’d have a tape with a whole Leno show on it. I hate Leno, so chances are I wouldn’t want to watch, let alone keep, a whole show. So we had 2 VCRs hoooked together and I’d have to dub it down. That’s ok, but tape to tape is automatically losing quality. Plus, as the first tape is re-used over and over again, it starts to get worn.
Now, Tivo gets it, I fast forward (very fast) to the point where the music starts, I pause it, put my VCR in play/record/pause, start the show, start the tape, dub it off, and hit delete on the Tivo. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it doesn’t wear tapes out. I loooove my Tivo! (that’s just one of the magical things I can do with it).
Why wouldn’t I want to replace my (pre-recorded) VHS collection? DVDs are better and they take up less space. I counted two shelves, one filled with VHS tapes and one filled with DVDs. The VHS shelf had 30 tapes on it. The same sized shelf right above it had 62 DVDs.
As I bought DVDs of favorite films, I’d give away my videos to a friend who wanted to build up his VHS collection. The only pre-recorded videos I have now are ones that aren’t important enough to replace or ones that aren’t on DVD (yet). Of course, I still have thousands of dubbed video tapes (old TV shows, movies, music taped from TV, etc.)
I converted all of my old home movies to DVD, and now I can run the movies in slow motion, pause, go frame by frame, do close ups with the zoom function, and shift the images.
The extra features of DVD movies is another reason why I like DVD - how they made the movie, outtakes of the movies, directors comments, etc.
“I freely admit to being merely a young whippersnapper, with less than 26 years below my belt, but that’s still old enough to remember a time before the coming of DVD, and to have rented and bought movies before DVD meant anything to anyone outside the technical industry. I’ve never seen a VHS tape priced at $100. It sounds totally ridiculous. It’s always been $10-$20.”
You also mentioned that you’re Swedish, which probably matters in this regard. But here in the States we were subject to the demands of Blockbuster Video for about a decade, a company that demanded (and got) the concession that new-release VHS’s were to be priced at a premium for the first 3-9 months after release. The price was generally in the $70-100 range, though some were even more - IIRC, the first VHS release of Schindler’s List could NOT be gotten for under $100.
Over the past 2-3 years, however, Blockbuster has been getting kicked in the gnads over this very issue by the unlikeliest of consumer hero’s, Wal-Mart, who demanded that DVD new-releases be priced to sell, not to rent. Blockbuster put up a huge fight, until Wal-Mart finally told the studios: “Look - we have a quarter-trillion in sales each year, compared to BV’s puny $5 billion in rental income. We likely sell more tie-in merchandising crap than they spend on movies. Now tell us: WHO’S YOUR DADDY?!?!”
Game, set, and match: Wal-Mart.
I have to kick in, since no one else has yet, that at least here in the US combination VCR/DVD units are available. I sell them to people all the time, when they want a DVD player but still want to watch old VHS tapes. I’m sure that the quality isn’t as good as separate components (combos never are), but it is a viable solution for VHS diehards.
“Why would anyone want to replace their collection?”
Because VHS cassettes start to turn to fuzz in about 15 years according to Sony…
On the other hand, who knows if there are going to be dvd players in 15 years if you choose that for archival purposes.
Now if they would just let up on the Pan & Scam push I might consider buying from them again.
Unfortunately, on this point they’re in league with Blockbuster. If a movie comes out on two separate disks - one P&S, one Widescreen - Blockbuster will only carry the P&S version.
I refuse to rent a movie in P&S, and it ticks me off to no end that Blockbuster does this (I don’t have another video store within decent spur-of-the-moment driving distance).
P&S is bullshit - but that’s another thread
I want to put in another vote for DVD–I’m a big fan of movies; before I moved away for school, SisterArmadillo and I used to go to our (small, one-screen, but with huge balconies and fantastic art-deco style interior) local movie theater two or three times a week. Sometimes more often, if something good was playing. However, I owned maybe ten movies on VHS, most of which were Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks movies, or Laurel and Hardy. In other words, something I’d rarely get a chance to see at the theater. I found the sound and image quality of VHS soooooo poor in comparison to the theater experience that I just couldn’t stand to watch them.
And then, there were DVDs.
Every spare cent goes to adding to my movie collection. I have shelves of 'em. It’s glorious. I can go home, pop some popcorn, open a beer, cuddle with Mr. Armadillo, and watch anything I want and not be apalled at what I’m not seeing. Or hearing.
You may not have known what you were missing, but some of us did. Come to the dark side, Priceguy. Embrace the DVD.
Peace,
~mixie
I don’t own movies, but I rent them and I got tired of watching tapes that had problems, tapes I had to rewind, etc. I only rent the DVD version and won’t touch the tape even if it’s there.
For me the DVD and the technology that plays them is a real advantage. I bought a 5 disc carousel DVD/CD player that can also play MP3 CD’s. This single unit replaced my existing single disc DVD player, 5 disc Sony CD player and my VCR.
I think a better recording solution for a DVD player/recorder is one that plays DVD’s and has a 500 gig hardrive for recording programs for later playback.