Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/21/this-month-japan-will-manufac.html
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Expect a VHS-only store to appear in a hipster neighborhood near you soon. Y'now, the image just looks... warmer.Sure, if you want to shout "Me too!" by owning a television. Personally, I prefer bringing in an amateur theatre company to stage a re-enactment of the show. It's like Matlock is there in the room with me!
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[quote=“pesco, post:1, topic:81930”]According to the newspaper Nikkei, it’s difficult to source the parts[/quote]Now I’m curious as to what parts those would be.
Seems to me there ought to be a profitable market for frustrating little kits that can be plugged into an Arduino board and combined with a couple of 3D-printed widgets to make something that will mostly play a VHS tape once or twice before being consigned to a corner to collect dust forever.
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So this means Beta wins, right?
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It was a long hard fight, but the superior format won…
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Why on earth were they still making VHS recorders?
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Not “warmer” (I know, I got it), but it definitely the “glitch aesthetic”
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Unfortunately it was a little late for the Vanderbilt TV News Archive that invested heavily in Beta then had to switch to VHS.
Hopefully going digital will make such transitions easier and less expensive in the future.
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Apparently because there was still a market for them-- they reportedly sold 750,000 units last year, according to one source. Doubtless there are still a lot of legacy users… but Funai is finding that line of business less lucrative with every passing year, and apparently finding parts needed to manufacture VCR assemblies has become a challenge… Analog video is increasingly archaic, and it’s not as if NTSC/PAL weren’t already quite tired standards when digital HD video took the world by storm a decade ago.
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One still has a need to support the legacy stockpile of recorded video tapes, I guess. School stuff, security/police, etc.
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What, you think your grandfather is going to rebuy all his porn on DVD? He already did that once alread, making the move from 8mm to VHS! He’s not made of money, you know.
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I’m gonna stock up. Laugh now, haters, but one day you’ll see those babies up on eBay Squared for like a trillion dollars. (neo-NAFTA dollars, before inflation.)
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One thing I can say in support of VHS, no DRM.
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Macrovision.
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U-Matic FTW!
…never send to know for whom the light blinks;
It blinks for thee.
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Sadly that’s not true
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Indeed. I have a VHS collection of Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New TV program from about 1981. I would like to continue to be able to play it occasionally; it is terrific. It was ghastly expensive, but after searching for it at museum gift shops and so on for literally over a decade, I finally found it at the University of Michigan (I think) using an early Alta Vista search. The librarian told me how to get it. It was only available to businesses, but included presentation rights. And it is heavily protected, by the good folks at Macrovision. I see it’s available in DVD now, after all these years (still very expensive for 8 one-hour episodes).
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Because some people do. It know what to do with themselves in a democracy?
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A lot of people still have boxes of old home movies sitting around. Someone’s bound to try watching one again sooner or later.
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