Slashdot Mirror
The VHS is Dead
Ronnie Coote writes "The UK's largest retailer of electronics is phasing out VHS VCRs. Sales of DVD players have outstripped VCRs by 40-to-1 recently. So how long until the mass market will be saying goodbye to the DVD player?" A few historical links to commemorate the occasion: Sony Kills Betamax, Why VHS Was Better, and How to Preserve VHS Recordings. For the future, maybe we'll have Digital VHS, but I suspect it will mostly be hard drive-based recorders.
Maybe in the early days of the video wars, but Beta turned out to be a far superior format than VHS. The quality was better, less quality was lost when copying, the tapes were a bit smaller, Beta tapes last longer, etc. The reason VHS won was because a Beta would only hold one hour and a VHS would hold two when they were released. Later Beta tapes would hold 5 hours in an extended play format, and they'd lose less quality in the extended format as well. Sucks that VHS had to win.
Man, if only you were in a position to...teach them patience or something. But nevermind, you're just a parent.
Let me guess how many kids you've got...
Zero, right? No matter what you try, most toddlers don't have patience. It isn't something you can teach a 2 year old. If you really think that you can, you've got a big surprise coming when you do have kids.
Betamax gets the last laugh - it seems that it was better than DVD too.
Soooory, not even close. I once did a technical comparison and Betamax is about 5% better than VHS (10%, maybe). It has a few more lines of resolution (220 vs 200, IIRC) and cleaner chroma recording. It definately does not even touch DVD for quality.
You might be talking about BetaCam, which does compete with DVD for quality (although, again, doesn't match). However, it doesn't compete on price; a decent BetaCam VTR usually being in the $1,000+ range.
BetaCam came out a long time after BetaMax was totally dead. Its VHS competition, Super-VHS, found a niche market in the homes of cheap people who wanted near DVD-level quality at a reasonable price (at the time). Also, it seems to be popular with very small TV studios. Super-VHS is not as good as BetaCam, although it is very reasonably close, and is about 1/3 the price.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
VHS tape drives for backup was tried, back in 8088-based PC days. They used to advertise them in Byte magazine. They were a little touchy, tho, so they never gained trust, so never gained momentum.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
Letting the Media conglomerates decide when you can
fast-forward is part of the original deal to get a license to build
DVD players. Google was not immediately helpful, but the truth is out there...