
Japan Will Make Its Last VCR This Month - lisper
http://mentalfloss.com/article/83427/japan-will-make-its-last-ever-vcr-month
======
niftich
My nostalgia towards VCRs comes not from the inherent features of the format,
but rather the circumstances around its usage.

Specifically, I fondly remember the days when all you needed to record TV was
to push the 'record' button. You didn't have to indefinitely rent a set-top
box from your cable provider; your video storage was easily expandable (just
buy more tapes), there was no such thing as unskippable commercials or 'sorry
you're not authorized to record this channel'.

It was a simpler time.

~~~
buckbova
> It was a simpler time.

Until you try to program the vcr to record a show while you're watching
another show.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101587/quotes?item=qt0238698](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101587/quotes?item=qt0238698)

~~~
baddox
Or program a VCR at all. That is literally a phrase that is used to refer to
difficult and arcane tasks.

~~~
throwaway049
I am surprised at the number of comments to this effect on a site where I am
normally in awe of the depth and breadth of technical knowledge, and the
willingness to learn by doing, that is displayed. I found VCRs easy enough to
use and only ever got caught out by Programme Delivery Control.

~~~
agildehaus
There's a major difference between people on this site (who likely had no
issue scheduling a VCR) and the average consumer.

A sizable chunk of humanity, from my experience, is scared to even try.

~~~
Delameko
My aunt used to have two VCRs and an alarm clock. She'd use the alarm to
remind her to hit record. She struggled with the timer, but I don't think she
trusted it to record what she asked it to.

It's now 2016. She's got two DVRs... and an alarm clock.

------
mc32
This is crazy "Many collectors consider VHS to be the vinyl of analog video
recording, and think the future could see them hoarded just as
enthusiastically"

I can sort of get the melancholy/nostalgia for vinyl records, despite the
crackles and pops... But low def video? How can someone think it's superior to
modern alternatives? I can understand not being enamored with seeing people's
warts on high def... But aside from faces, high def is demonstrably better,
no?

~~~
DINKDINK
>How can someone think [VHS Video is] superior to modern alternatives?

There are two camps of people in the legacy-media market,
collectors/nostalgists, archivist. There are many nostaligists who enjoy vinyl
for the warm feeling it psycologically imparts and similarly so for VHS video.

Where the legacy-media market splits is when it comes to archivist. There are
many archivist who prefer the vinyl medium over digital because of media-rot
issues. The robustness of vinyl is exceptional compared to other medium [1] If
you want to play back a CD you are reliant on a CD player and all of it's
integrated circuits working properly to extract the information. With vinyl
all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail. This is
attractive to archivists.

The closest equivalent of vinyl in the video domain is film: super low tech
play back (heck you can even look at it) it's longevity is worse than vinyl
though.

[1]probably due to it's low information density and how the data is sequenced.
I.e. one aberrant perturbation of the medium or read head doesn't cause large
chunks of the data to be lost or unreadable.

~~~
pipio21
"With vinyl all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail."

All you need something that rotates and a thin nail?

It is really hard to make something that rotates well enough to play vinyl
discs. I know because I made my own DIY vinyl player as a young engineering
student. In the end it was way simpler and it did sound better to make a
contactless(optical) head with air blowing to remove the dust. Even then it
did not sound as well as the real thing.

It takes a couple millions of dollars to replicate an old vynil player with
similar quality. Those plates are balanced and big. The head needs
micromachined components.

Companies spent an enormous amount of capital in order to do it right, and
every unit is expensive to make.

It is way simpler to read a CD today than to read a Vinyl. Normal players also
destroy the discs over time. How many optical Vinyl players you see? How much
them cost?

Reading CDs is super simple. They are pots or no pots, zeros or ones. We could
do it with simple step motors today and cheap lasers.

One aberrant [and multiple] perturbation on the medium in digital is easily
fixed with CRC checking. Also with digital there are millions of disc with the
exact same information. For archivists this makes incredible simple to restore
all the information.

It is in analog where you lose data. First, every disc, or film or tape is
different from the others, you can only guess what is original and what is
noise, degradation and so on.

In Vinyl, if the head jumps too fast your sound saturates and you lose
everything in between. Dust , scratches, a hair, everything could harm you.

------
bsder
Cowboy Bebop--"Speak Like a Child"

We're going to lose a lot of history when we can't read VCR tapes anymore.

~~~
nv-vn
This was my first thought seeing this post :(

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Kaedon
“Watching them on VHS is closer to the old drive-in or grindhouse theater, the
way the director intended it to look.” Practically no director intended for
the films to look terrible on VHS tapes, it was a limitation of the
technology. I understand enjoying the look of the technology as a consumer and
I doubt the producers cared for it.

~~~
thaw13579
Maybe they didn't care about it, but I guess they accounted for it. For
example, the medium can hide costume or makeup elements that would otherwise
break the suspension of disbelief (personally I find this to be the case when
watching HD remasters of older scifi).

------
INTPenis
I was under the impression that there was no way to stop VHS tapes degrading
for every time you watch them. Or does that only apply to recording?

I remember taping music videos from MTV on VHS when I was a kid, like a mix
tape of videos. And that tape was pretty worn out after just a few re-
recordings, the quality was noticeably affected.

~~~
ams6110
I found that stuff you recorded yourself was lower grade than what you bought
prerecorded. I had some purchased movies that were watched many dozens of
times and were still fine. And Blockbuster did, for a while, have a great
business in renting out tapes over and over again, and I don't recall ever
getting a noticeably degraded copy from them.

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Animats
Used pro-grade VHS VCRs are getting expensive. That's what you want for
transcribing old VHS tapes to some other medium. Pro units have timebase
correction and lack Macrovision copy protection, so you can get a clean signal
out.

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ojm
> Their VCRs are made in China and sold in many territories, including North
> America, under brand names like Sanyo..

The title is misleading as it seems they are ceasing their production in China
(likely already ceased in Japan).

Further, with 750,000 units sold worldwide by them, there is enough of a
market for China to continue manufacturing (a quick search also shows some on
Alibaba making VCR/DVD combo players).

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kpil
One peculiar thing in the last few years of the VHS era, was that they were
really cheap.

They were so much more mechanically complex than DVD players, but still as
cheap as the cheap no name DVD players - although they must have been much
more expensive to manufacture.

The margins must have been infinitesimal.

~~~
ams6110
The engineering was initially more complex. But once the production tooling
was done, it probably didn't cost a lot to churn them out.

The quality of the components in a cheap VCR is also shocking. Compare a early
Sony Betamax deck to one of the $49 VCRs you could buy at the end of their
era.

------
ridgeguy
I still have a VCR that I very occasionally use to watch some old VHS tapes.
Nostalgia nite, with buttered popcorn. The OP article will probably be the
kick in the butt I need to send those tapes off for copying to DVD.

When my VCR finally dies, I'll probably miss most the flashing green "12:00".
It indicates that in 31 years, I never did RTFM to figure out how to set the
time. And never will. One finds one's inner rebel in the least significant
places....

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Noos
Its not so much the vinyl comparison, as it is there is a a lot of content
that never made it to DVD, let alone blu-ray. It took decades for the Osamu
Tezuka Unico films to get a release on DVD, and some movies may never see one.
The cult animated series The Bionic Six has yet to see such. While youtube
exists, it's vulnerable to releasing edited or incomplete versions of the
originals.

------
orionblastar
I got a lot of movies on VHS rated G to R movies in a box in my basement. Last
VCR I had ate tapes and I had to quit using it as I didn't know how to fix
that.

I know there are DVD and VHS hybrids that were able to copy VHS tapes to DVD-R
disks. But that can't be done with copy protection in the VHS tapes.

My wife and I have our wedding in 1997 on two VHS tapes, I haven't had a
capture card to convert it to MP4 files or whatever. We got a lot of tapes in
8MM format and the advanced format that replaced it using video cameras as
well. I don't make much money because I am disabled and trying to get better
so I can write code again. So paying a professional to transfer it would cost
too much.

In Thailand they quit using VHS tapes and went to the VideoCD format as CD
players are cheaper to make than VHS VCRs, plus when they pirate a movie it is
on VideoCD format using 3 or 4 CDs to play the whole movie. In the USA we went
to Video DVD disks (Red Box or Family Video, etc), or BluRay disks.

------
jgalt212
> At the time, the machines cost $50,000 apiece. But that did not stop orders
> from being placed for 100 of them in the week they debuted, according to Mr.
> Pfost. “This represented an amount almost as great as a year’s gross income
> for Ampex,” he wrote[1].

Now, that's a hockey stick.

[1][http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/technology/the-long-
final-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/technology/the-long-final-
goodbye-of-the-vcr.html?_r=0)

------
red_blobs
I have no nostalgia toward VHS tapes. They degrade too easily.

In fact, I made digital backups of all my dvds and got rid of the physical
media.

Backup is easy and I can stream my entire collection to every room in the
house (or my computer/phone when I'm outside).

------
kazinator
> _last year’s figures reported just 750,000 sales worldwide_

Hacker, you chew on that while you struggle to sell some half-decent and
useful app to twenty people. :)

------
Ecco
750 000 units per year still looks like a decent figure. At $100 a piece
they'd still be making $75M in sales...

~~~
throwanem
They don't even go for $100 a pop at retail, much less at white-box wholesale.

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sjclemmy
> but last year’s figures reported just 750,000 sales worldwide...

Wow.

I can't see anyone mourning the passing of VHS. Dreadful quality. Whereas in
the audio arena CDs didn't improve on Vinyl, DVD technology was way better
than VHS.

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sanoli
Obligatory video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4iw8Ppo1o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4iw8Ppo1o)

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pcurve
Funai owns sanyo, magnavox, emerson.

[http://www.funai.us/](http://www.funai.us/)

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callmeed
Can a VCR record HD broadcasts? I've never really thought about this because
my use of the 2 never overlapped.

~~~
figgis
No, VCR can only record SD.

Although I believe you can use a digital converter/tuner.

~~~
gcr
What defines the definition in VCR tape? The size of the magnetic grains in
the tape or something like that? Is it possible to manufacture a special
magnetic VCR tape that could write DVD-quality definition?

~~~
eon1
In practice it'd just be the standard of the signal that's being recorded
(PAL/NTSC/SECAM). Wouldn't surprise me if the actual tape is capable of
handling more..

~~~
ams6110
Consumer VHS VCRs could not reproduce the full fidelity of a broadcast NTSC
picture. Commercial VCRs, which typically used Betamax, were better and used
by broadcasters until digital took over.

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peter303
I still have a Funai VCR I use to record a few programs. Works with 720 scan
lines and savescthe cable DVR fee.

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smaili
A lot of great memories - RIP!

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18edad8ec8e
That's good for the _free software community_, as most of the VCR's ship with
proprietary, closed source software. Notice how I didn't say open source
software. The term open source software is beginning to be a marketing term.
You have "open source software" companies like GitLab, who claim they are an
"open source company", but their primary product is closed source.

