I know they don’t make them anymore, just curious who still has one. I do which I only dig out every couple years or so to watch old tapes,
(mostly tapes I taped off television for movies I haven’t seen anywhere again, interviews, award shows… junk. Haha. Oh and home movies of course!!— I still need to convert these)
I do not have a VCR but I do have some tapes. I would send them out for digital conversion before I would buy a VCR.
shareI have a few VCRs, including one that was top of the line when it was new, from the company that invented VHS in the first place (JVC HR-D566U; original retail price in 1985 was $900 - https://i.imgur.com/8UntFXf.png ). It was the first VCR to have HQ circuitry (and it was the original full implementation of it, not the watered-down implementation of it that came along later). I bought it off eBay several years ago because I wanted to see what a high-end VCR was capable of. But before I could do that I had to fix it, because the picture was all screwed up, like so:
https://i.imgur.com/TmUEOQF.jpg
It seemed to be a power supply issue so I replaced all of the electrolytic capacitors in its power supply (it has a linear power supply rather than a cheap switch-mode power supply like most VCRs have) with new high temperature @ long life Rubycon capacitors, and that did the trick. Then I needed a good quality recording. I have several official VHS releases, including the original Thorn EMI release of The Terminator (1984) that's playing in the screenshot above, but official VHS releases have never been very good recordings, so I made my own recording from the Blu-ray release of The Terminator at the fastest (highest quality) recording speed.
The results were amazing. Not only did it look drastically better than the official VHS release, but from my normal viewing distance (about 10' from my 32" standard-resolution CRT TV), it could easily be mistaken for a DVD-over-composite.
VHS has a reputation for bad picture quality, but most people have never seen VHS at its full potential. That's because, during VHS's heyday, even if you had the best VCR on the market, there were no high quality recordings, and you couldn't make one yourself because there were no high quality video sources to record from (unless you had access to 35mm film prints and a telecine machine; fat chance of that) because DVDs, let alone Blu-rays, didn't exist yet. The best you could realistically get for source material was a LaserDisc or an over-the-air NTSC broadcast with perfect reception.
Wow! $900 in 1985 would be equivalent to $2444.86 in 2022. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
shareYeah, I never could have afforded it when it was new. Well, I was only 10 years old in 1985, so that goes without saying, but my parents would have scoffed at the idea of paying that much for just about anything other than a used car or a major home improvement project.
We didn't get a VCR until Christmas of '88, and it was about $250 new: a General Electric VG-7720, manufactured by Panasonic (as far as I know, no VHS VCR was ever made by an American company; all the ones with ostensibly American brand names such as Zenith, GE, RCA, Magnavox, were made by Japanese or Korean companies). It had the same basic design as the $299 Panasonic Omnivision here:
https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1988-Sears-Christmas-Book/0665
It even had that same remote control, except with GE branding of course. It worked good, though it was far from high-end. It didn't have Hi-Fi Stereo, but it did have HQ circuitry (most likely the watered down implementation of it) and 4 heads, which gave a very stable freeze-frame image, more so than most other 4-head VCRs even. It also had a slow-motion and frame-advance function, which seemed awesome at the time. I still have it, though it needs new capacitors.
You can't set the current date on it anymore because it maxes out at 2006 or so. I discovered its date limit when I was a kid playing around with it, and at the time it seemed like some incredibly futuristic date that would never arrive.
It's funny how 2006 now seems so ancient.
shareI do.
shareI do! It's still hooked up to my TV and I have a large collection of videos.
I have a couple of DVD players, too.
I assume you have a HDTV. What is the picture quality like? Is there any stretching or skewing? Or did you hold onto an old analog TV for this purpose?
shareI have an old TV/DVD combo and attached my old VCR to it. The VCR is analog so it won't tape anything now.
Not HDTV. A black border shows since the TV is rectangular instead of square. No stretching or skewing.
"The VCR is analog so it won't tape anything now."
You can still tape OTA broadcasts with it, but you'd need an ATSC-to-NTSC converter box. They were common when the analog to digital changeover happened in 2009; there were even government subsidies so that people could get them for free (up to a certain dollar amount). They still make them; for example:
https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Converter-Box-ATSC-Cabal/dp/B07Z5RGLK6/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Hdtv+Converter+Box&qid=1656262041&sr=8-3
Just connect a TV antenna to the converter box and RCA cables from the box to the RCA inputs on your VCR.
I know about the converters and bought one at that time with the subsidy. I never hooked it up and gave it away once On Demand services and network websites began to show TV shows and movies.
I have no plan to convert my old videos into DVDs so I'll likely always have a VCR.
I kept one VCR, the one with the four heads for better playback quality; I also have a digital converter. Someday I'll get around to digitizing the material I plan on keeping.
shareI do, I still have some tapes but most have been upgraded to digital.
share