Japan Will Make Its Last-Ever VCR This Month (mentalfloss.com)

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Japan Will Make Its Last-Ever VCR This Month (mentalfloss.com)

Posted by msmash on Wednesday July 20, 2016 @06:44AM from the good-bye dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Most of us stopped using video cassette recorders a very, very long time ago. By 2008, DVD had officially replaced VHS as the preferred home media format, and the glory days of the 1980s -- when VHS and Betamax battled it out to be the number-one choice for watching and recording movies and television at home -- were very much in the rear-view mirror. So it might surprise you to learn that VCRs are still being manufactured -- at least they were until this month. Funai Electric, the last remaining Japanese company to make the units, has announced that the company will cease production on its VCR units, due to declining sales and difficulty acquiring parts. Their VCRs are made in China and sold in many territories, including North America, under brand names like Sanyo, but last year's figures reported just 750,000 sales worldwide.

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What by sexconker · 2016-07-20 06:50 · Score: 5, Informative

"Japan Will Make Its Last-Ever VCR This Month"
"Funai Electric, the last remaining Japanese company to make the units, has announced that the company will cease production on its VCR units, due to declining sales and difficulty acquiring parts."
"Their VCRs are made in China and sold in many territories, including North America, under brand names like Sanyo, but last year's figures reported just 750,000 sales worldwide."
So China will make its last VCR under contract for a Japanese rebrander.
VCR didn't compete against DVD by phantomfive · 2016-07-20 06:52 · Score: 3, Insightful

VCRs haven't competed against DVDs for a long time. If you buy a movie, it has come on DVD (or blue-ray) for over a decade.

The reason people buy VCRs now is to record shows off the TV to watch them later. That's not easy to do on a DVD player. So as DVRs have become more popular, they've replaced the final uses for VCR.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
1. Re:VCR didn't compete against DVD by Dorianny · 2016-07-20 07:06 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Most people myself included, get a new VCR because the old one is acting wonky and they still have a large library of tapes, much of it old home movies that they haven't had the time or inclination to transfer to digital. As the equipment gets harder to find and the film on the tapes degrades, eventually I will have to force myself to tacked the mammoth task of converting it all to digital
2. Re:VCR didn't compete against DVD by phantomfive · 2016-07-20 07:15 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Get a convertor. Every time you watch a VCR tape, after you are done, set it to convert to DVD (or whatever), and then walk away. Low effort, and the things you watch the most will be converted first.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
3. Re:VCR didn't compete against DVD by mjwx · 2016-07-20 07:51 · Score: 2
  
  VCRs haven't competed against DVDs for a long time. If you buy a movie, it has come on DVD (or blue-ray) for over a decade. The reason people buy VCRs now is to record shows off the TV to watch them later. That's not easy to do on a DVD player. So as DVRs have become more popular, they've replaced the final uses for VCR.
  We've had DVR's for that for a long time now. The VCR is used almost elusively by the security industry because some laggards haven't updated to digital storage. There are a few VCR enthusiasts out there, same as there is for everything but they're very few in number and certainly not enough to sustain a single manufacturing plant.
  
  --
  Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
4. Re:VCR didn't compete against DVD by lgw · 2016-07-20 08:05 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  I'd take that bet. The big studios love BluRay, as it's a revenue model they understand and fully control. They aren't exactly fast learners. I heard an MPAA executive shouted "ouch" in a meeting today because he had stubbed his toe over the weekend.
  
  --
  Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
5. Re:VCR didn't compete against DVD by tsqr · 2016-07-20 08:15 · Score: 2
  
  VCRs haven't competed against DVDs for a long time. If you buy a movie, it has come on DVD (or blue-ray) for over a decade.
  Well, you'd certainly think so. And in terms of competing, you're right. But amazingly, you can still buy movies in VHS format.
6. Re:VCR didn't compete against DVD by jeffmflanagan · 2016-07-20 08:48 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  We reached that point years ago, and if you have to buy an eBay VCR when yours fails, your conversions will be lower quality than if played on the machine they were recorded on. VHS sucked that way.
  
  The good news is that Time Base Correctors are inexpensive now, so I was able to fix flagging and color problems caused by playing on a different machine in most cases.
  
  I had a huge tape collection, 75% of which turned out to be worthless because much better copies of the shows and movies are now available, but I did convert the remaining 25% to MP4 files. A few tapes were completely unplayable because time is very hard on magnetic tape.
  
  I can't believe anyone would fail to upgrade home movies to a durable format, and just wait for them to degrade into uselessness while planning to convert them someday. That's destroying things via procrastination that should be handed down to your descendants.
7. Re:VCR didn't compete against DVD by thegarbz · 2016-07-20 09:24 · Score: 2
  
  DVD is a format far from dead thanks to the practically free ability for manufacturers to provide support for it. There's no Bluray player on the market that can't also play DVDs right now, and that won't change until Bluray as a format dies too.
  But DVD has a heck of a lot going for it. You can easily play it back on any player unencumbered by codec support. The decoders are available open source, and the tools to encode them are widely available. The same can not be said for any modern format some of which are stillbirths. If you want to archive something then something like VP8 or HEVC is not a good choice at all. H.264 is a bit better but support for it is still no where near as universal as a classic pop it in a player and hit play DVD.
  But really if the data is important to you then selecting one format is a silly thing in the first place as many HDDVD owners will attest to.
8. Re:VCR didn't compete against DVD by AmiMoJo · 2016-07-21 00:57 · Score: 2
  
  Many years ago I installed a few CCTV systems. Fully digital of course. One of the clients kept some VCRs around too. Not hooked up to anything, just powered on with the clock set. He said that in previous burglaries the crooks had taken the DVR with them, to destroy evidence presumably, so he wanted the VCRs as dummies to be taken instead.
  No idea if it worked or not, but he was always looking in the local paper for used VCRs.
  
  --
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  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re:That's it! by operagost · 2016-07-20 06:58 · Score: 2

PFFT! Betamax is old news. I'm banking on HD-DVD.

--

Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
3/4 million sold last year by silas_moeckel · 2016-07-20 06:59 · Score: 2

Who in hell bought these?

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No sir I dont like it.
1. Re:3/4 million sold last year by HBI · 2016-07-20 07:04 · Score: 2
  
  People who still have a lot of VHS tapes and don't have access to rocket ship internet speeds. I know a few who live in rural farm areas who get by with DSL ~5 miles from the CO and can't download anything. Nor are interested in rebuying stuff they already have on DVD.
  
  --
  HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
People with hundreds of tapes? Recording for dummi by raymorris · 2016-07-20 07:10 · Score: 2

I imagine two groups of people are still buying them, aside for specialty uses.
Some people BUY movies, and some of those have hundreds of video tapes they've purchased over the years. For some old movies, they can be replaced with DVD iexpensively, but Disney is an important exception. 50 Disney movies isn't cheap.
I also know people for whom their primary entertainment is shows they've recorded. They are comfortable with their routine. Current DVRs available for purchase haven't converted all of these people, and DVRs rented from the cable company are expensive.
Then there are 200 niche uses, with ten or twenty people in each niche.
Just 750,000 sales worldwide by Anonymous Coward · 2016-07-20 07:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

That sounds like a lot to me.
kinda sad by Anonymous Coward · 2016-07-20 07:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

750,000 sales isn't enough to be interesting these days :(
No one can just make money anymore, you have to make MORE than you made yesterday or you're a failure :/
(Wonder how that will work out for Nintendo next year...)
1. Re:kinda sad by sootman · 2016-07-20 07:56 · Score: 2
  
  I'm sure some Chinese company -- maybe one you've kind heard of (like Huawei) or maybe a totally new one -- will pick up the slack. 750k units/year oughtta be enough for someone. If there's only one choice on the shelf, it'll sell no matter what name is on the box.
  Free tip: make one VCR and sell it under two brand names. Make the first slightly flimsy-looking (like a late-90s entry-level Mitsubishi unit) and sell it for $X, and make the other weigh 6oz more (via the addition of a useless steel plate in the top), and give it a slightly more upscale-looking set of buttons (think Sony in the 80s) and sell it for $X+10.
  I wish I had the capital to get into the business. This is a total gimme. There are enough tapes out there to keep a small company afloat for 5-10 years. Make hay while the sun shines.
  
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2. Re:kinda sad by sootman · 2016-07-20 08:07 · Score: 2
  
  (One of those times when I wish there was an edit button...)
  One last thought: make a model for a few bucks more with a built-in analog-to-digital converter (c'mon, that's gotta be like 20 cents now for something that only needs to do SD video) and let it output straight to a USB drive. Hell, maybe add a couple more circuits to 'upscale' to HD because people are idiots. If you wanna be really fancy, give it some built-in storage and a browser-based front-end so you can watch from any device in the house, and of course mobile apps because (again) people are idiots and don't understand right-clicking and "save as" in a browser.)
  Come to think of it, just do the network thing and skip the USB. Just a button that says "capture to digital" and then you download it from another machine and/or post to YT or FB. 16 GB storage will hold ~16 hours of SD video, 640x480* @ 30fps ar around 1500kbps (which is PLENTY for tape.) Also, convert from 480i to 480p, always and only. And, from experience, bump up the contrast a bit. Analog tape can't make blacks as dark as people are now used to.)
  *FUCK* I want to do this. THE MONEY IS SITTING THERE ON THE TABLE, WAITING TO BE TAKEN. You have a GENERATION of people with disposable income and a childhood's worth of tapes they want to convert, but it needs to be a bit slicker than existing video capture solutions.
  Can someone with more time and experience than I have do a kickstarter of this? I'm not looking for a cut of the profits, I just want this to exist. Hell, I'll back it and buy the first one.
  
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3. Re:kinda sad by Master+Moose · 2016-07-20 10:39 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Yes, the number of time I hear about "XXX in trouble as profits down on last year"
  As far as I am aware, profit means you made more than you spent, Being profitable is good. So, while more profit is good, less profit is also good and definitely not "Trouble".
  
  --
  . . .gone when the morning comes
Re:People with hundreds of tapes? Recording for du by whoever57 · 2016-07-20 07:37 · Score: 2

And Disney VHS cassettes come with DRM, so you can't always convert them to DVD yourself.
You just need a video "stabilizer"

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Re:People with hundreds of tapes? Recording for du by Crashmarik · 2016-07-20 07:48 · Score: 2

If you look on the net, you'll find lots of people have been kind enough to do it for you.
Re:People with hundreds of tapes? Recording for du by TheGratefulNet · 2016-07-20 07:55 · Score: 2

read up on macrovision.
lots of ways to mess with analog signals and 'drm them'.

--

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Re:That's it! by narcc · 2016-07-20 08:46 · Score: 2

If he's happy with them, what difference does it make?

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Required reading for internet skeptics
750,000 by xlsior · 2016-07-20 13:24 · Score: 2

750,000 units a year is still over 2,000 a day -- there's plenty of companies that would kill for those kind of numbers.