JVC ends VCR production after 32 years

[Edward Phillips]

I still produce quite a few VHS tapes. They are often accompanied with a DVD version as well but here are some reasons from clients why they still like the VHS format (given that these clients are over the age of 30).

1. You can cue the tape at a certain point, pop it out, pop it in, push play and you're ready to go. No "crazy" chapter menus.
2. Again, no "crazy" menu to get through just to play the video.
3. Despite having mechanical parts, a VHS seems to hold up better in a client's posession than a DVD. Quite often, the video will be left with no protective casing on a desk or shuffled around. A VHS tape will survive, a DVD will be scratched to death.

I think VHS will still live on with security cameras as well. Many a company still pop in a SLP VHS tape to record 6 hours of security footage on a tape that's been recorded over 100 times. It will be a while before they upgrade to something digital.

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Chris Hurd

(The same thing was supposed to happen with VHS, remember the D9 / Digital-S format? But it lost out to DigiBeta in the mid-90's and then briefly reappeared as D-VHS, as Jeff notes above).

Earlier still, there were attempts by Matshushita to bring to market a professional cassette system based on similar principles to Betacam, but in a VHS cassette, called M-format. Apparently it was truly awful, far worse quality than U-matic, and never really saw the light of commercial day.

Next try was MII, which was more successful commercially, but only ever saw a fraction of the sales of Betacam. All the reports I've ever heard were that it was unreliable, and the stations that did adopt it came to wish they'd gone with Betacam.

Final pro system to use the VHS size cassette was Digital-S, which users generally seemed to be much kinder about than MII. But by this time Betacam SP and Digi-Beta were dominant, and Panasonic had gone on to DVCPro and DVCPro50, so AFAIK only JVC ever produced the format.