Re: will dvds murder the videos?

On 03 Dec 2003 14:45:05 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Nick Macpherson)
wrote:

>>From: MR_ED_of_Course [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
>
>>Where I live (in California), you can find DVD players for as little as $29,
>>which is amazing because the licensing fees for a DVD player is about $20.
>>That leaves $9 for parts, labor and shipping...ouch.
>
>But if you try to buy that $29 DVD player, you risk getting crushed to death.
>
>>I think next Christmas the big consumer electronic item will be inexpensive
>>DVR/DVD recorders, and that will be the final nail on the rotting corpse
>>that is VHS.
>>
>>About 2 years ago I gave away my entire VHS collection except for a few rare
>>and personal tapes.  I'm in the process of converting those to DVD and then
>>I'll finally be free of the beast. 
>>
>
>Why is there so much hostility towards a format that worked fine for 20 years? 
>People weren't this malicious when 8 tracks were going down and those things
>were awful on every level.  Besides VHS is like the dinosaur--we make fun of
>its extinction but they'll still end up lasting longer than humans.  The VHS
>era will still be longer than the DVD era.  And the cultural impact of VHS in
>the 80s was much bigger than the cultural impact of DVD in the 00s despite any
>revisionist thinking.  

Well, eight track was always a second rate, subsidiary format. They
hadn't replaced LPs.

And I saw laserdiscs around 1979-80 -- the Magnovox "discovision"
format, we had a player in the Columbia University film department,
and while they weren't what laser became, I thought we were looking at
a brave new world. and instead, we spent most of two decades looking
at panned and scanned, marginal resolution VHS tapes. Glad to have
certain things to be able to see certain things, regardless of the
format, but was never under the illusion that this was the future.

What always astonished me was that some of the indie distributors were
perfectly willing to send VHS screeners out to reviewers -- even
making allowances for the crappiness of the formats, I was
occasionally startled when I'd see a film that they'd sent me on tape
and suddenly I'd realize that my ideas about the film were completely
misconstrued, simply because I hadn't been able to see the damn film
in its proper format.

Useful for time-shifting.
John Harkness