Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Last VHS manufacturer to cease production

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Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 07-27-2016, 06:02 PM:

Although it's been nearly 10 years since the studios stopped releasing movies on VHS (I believe Eragon was the last), it's taken until now for the technology to officially die.

Given that DVD sales didn't really take off until 2002-2003,its kind of mind blowing to think that a ubiquitous technology went from common to obsolete in a span of just 5-6 years. This has to be some sort of record for a consumer product.

Last VHS manufacturer to cease production

quote:
The final nail in the coffin of VHS has arrived. In other news, some people were still using VHS! Per Mental Floss (via ScreenCrush), the last remaining Japanese company to manufacture VCRs, Funai Electric, has announced that it will make its final VCR units this month, bringing an end to the first widespread home video format.

The first VCR (“Videocassette recorder” for you young ‘uns) to use VHS was released in 1976, and it enjoyed immense success throughout the 80s and 90s, until the superior DVD format came along. It seems so long ago now, but VHS was controversial upon first release,as the major movie studios went so far as to try to claim copyright violation for the transference of feature films to home video. Eventually the film industry embraced the home video market, resulting in the Blockbuster boon and many a home movie marathons throughout my childhood via the fuzzy, subpar, but somewhat comforting format known as VHS.

vcrWhile the last film to be released on VHS was Eragon in 2007, apparently people were still buying enough VCRs to keep Funai Electric in business. However, with just 750,000 sales worldwide last year, the company has chosen to cease production and bring a final end to the home video format once and for all.

Some folks continue to collect VHS tapes, with some going for thousands of dollars on eBay. The format is starting to hold a bit of a nostalgic appeal, but will they go the way of vinyl and see a resurgence in the future? I’m doubtful given that the VHS format routinely chopped up the aspect ratio of films and the tape itself can become quite worn and therefore doesn’t have the same playability that vinyl does, but hey, who knows?

So pour one out for VHS. ‘Tis truly the end of an era.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 07-27-2016, 06:25 PM:

I don't think VHS will do a "vinyl revival," and for the following reasons.

1 - The 525 or 625-line image has a unique aesthetic, but very few would perceive it as some sort of a quality standard in the way that they do with vinyl. I like listening to vinyl LPs, primarily because the RIAA curve (especially when combined with tube/valve amplification) was designed with human hearing in mind, and so subjectively to me, it sounds so much more "natural" than even 96kHz, ultra broad range, mega-fast sampling rate and uncompressed digital. I'm not saying that it's "better," just more human friendly. I don't think you'd find many who would try to make a similar argument about VHS versus the consumer standard, lossy compressed digital video formats that dominate physical media and streaming now.

2 - The complexity of the hardware components involved in recording and reproducing VHS is an order of magnitude above that involved with vinyl LP cutting and playback. There are people who make vinyl lathe cutterheads in their garages - you simply couldn't do that with helical scan head assemblies and all the electronics needed to drive them. I can't see how VHS hardware and media manufacture could be maintained as a boutique operation in the way that the vinyl record can be, and is enjoying a growing afterlife as a result.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 07-28-2016, 07:26 AM:

Think about another number. 750,000 in worldwide sales wasn't enough to bother with. That number is about 5 times the entire cinema industry! That is how tiny we are in the world of manufacturing.

And no, there will never be a VHS revival. Perhaps a niche collectors thing of existing hardware/recordings but VHS was not a beloved format for anything but its convenience/cost. It ceases to be either and isn't likely ever to regain those. Its only technical benefits over current technology is greater permanence. For the home recordist, magnetic tape holds up better than optical disc. Home burned CD/DVDs have a miserable shelf-life.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 07-28-2016, 10:55 AM:

Yup - the economies of scale on industrial machinery (which is what the stuff in our booths effectively is) are very different from those of consumer appliances.

quote: Steve Guttag
For the home recordist, magnetic tape holds up better than optical disc.

If the machinery needed to play it back holds up as well. The Smithsonian did a study on archival videotape holdings a while back, and concluded that in the case of many formats (2" Quad included), the number of head hours remaining on all the machines in the world known to survive falls a long way short of being enough to play (to make preservation copies) the tapes known to survive in systematic preservation.

This maybe less of an issue with VHS, because of the sheer number of machines made and the fact that around 99.99% of tapes in existence are not original recordings (they're copies of material preserved elsewhere). But even so, all but a handful of the VCRs made will be in landfill before long.

quote: Steve Guttag
Home burned CD/DVDs have a miserable shelf-life.

Phthalocyanine dye CDs will last for several decades if stored in complete darkness, which of course most aren't because they were sold in transparent or semi-transparent packaging.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 07-28-2016, 12:04 PM:

quote: Steve Guttag
Home burned CD/DVDs have a miserable shelf-life.

Really? I still have the first home burned CDs I ever made (from back when they used to cost about $3 each) and they still work fine. And I have a handful of "Mr. Data" brand disks that work perfectly as well. I don't think I've ever had a home-made CD refuse to play.

Maybe it's environmental. I've heard that they deteriorate in very humid environments. But here in dry-ish Montana they seem to last indefinitely.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 07-28-2016, 12:48 PM:

Mike must be lucky. Lots of these go bad, and the rate at which they do depends upon the burner, the blank media, and the storage conditions. Like color film, these disks fade when exposed to light, and also get scratched easily. The -RW disks are especially useless.

I will never defend VHS as being a good format, but it does have reasonably good interchangeability. A tape recorded on one machine will normally play fine in another machine (not necessarily optimally, but it will play). This is not true of optical media at all; a DVD that plays in an Oppo player may or may not play in a Panasonic or Sony player. (Note that I am talking about home-made disks here, not commercially manufactured ones, which generally play properly on any player.)

It is too bad that we no longer really have any formats at the consumer level that are shelf-stable for any length of time. I have my grandparents' 16mm home movies from 1950 and they are still watchable and look great. I have VHS tapes from my family that were shot in the mid-1980s that still play and don't really look any worse than they did when they were shot. Will future generations have any of this? Other than printed photographs, probably not. Digital storage is great in many ways, but I do not trust that most people will go to the trouble and expense to properly maintain their files.

As for the future of VHS, I don't really see the point of it, except for watching material that does not exist in newer, better formats.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 07-28-2016, 03:08 PM:

quote: Scott Norwood
Mike must be lucky. Lots of these go bad, and the rate at which they do depends upon the burner, the blank media, and the storage conditions.

With the exception of one box of that "Mr. Data" brand disks that I tried out just on a whim, I have always bought "name brand" disks, and all my burning has been done on plain old off-the-shelf drives found in Dell computers. I expect most of my good luck comes from the fact that the disks are always kept in their cases and (unless they're in my vehicle) they're stored inside the house. Plus I always make a booklet to go with the disk so they're not exposed to light, either. Admittedly they sure don't get much use anymore!

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 07-28-2016, 04:14 PM:

quote: Scott Norwood
It is too bad that we no longer really have any formats at the consumer level that are shelf-stable for any length of time. I have my grandparents' 16mm home movies from 1950 and they are still watchable and look great. I have VHS tapes from my family that were shot in the mid-1980s that still play and don't really look any worse than they did when they were shot. Will future generations have any of this? Other than printed photographs, probably not. Digital storage is great in many ways, but I do not trust that most people will go to the trouble and expense to properly maintain their files.

Probably the biggest single cause of people's personal archival material being lost is accidental destruction or disposal: "it got lost when we moved house," etc. etc. If you are motivated to look after something, it doesn't much matter what the medium is. If it's a medium that cannot be "stored and ignored," you're going to educate yourself as to what you have to do.

I still have some files that were created with my first computer, between 1989-92. When 5.25 floppies gave way to 3.5, I copied them while machines that had both types of drive in them were commonplace. From there the 3.5s were copied to Zip cartridges some time in the late '90s, and the contents of those were migrated to portable hard drives in the mid-00s. These files now sit on a NAS RAID, along with many others I've created or received in the last 27 years.

My point is that being motivated to preserve something is 99% of the battle. If you have that motivation, you'll figure out how.

In terms of chemical stability of image/sound media in long-term storage, my guess is that the shellac phonograph record probably comes out on top: with a typical shellac/filler mix for mass-pressed records, there is no special atmospheric requirement for storage, and no autocatalytic decomposition process. But even they have weak points, the main ones being weight and fragility.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 07-28-2016, 10:07 PM:

quote: Leo Enticknap
The 525 or 625-line image has a unique aesthetic, but very few would perceive it as some sort of a quality

Maybe BetaSP had those kinds of numbers, but not VHS. Hell Super VHS boasted "over 400 lines!". I'm still not sure exactly what they mean by "lines". Both Super VHS and regular limp-dick VHS had 486 effective horizontal lines in a single frame (240 or so per field... I don't count overscan). Maybe vertical lines? I think NTSC could go up to 720 "pixels" wide. So maybe Super VHS was a hair over 400px wide and regular limp-dick VHS was ... ???

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 07-28-2016, 11:31 PM:

525 and 625 were the total number of horizontal scan lines, including blanking and sync, in NTSC and PAL. In NTSC the active picture horizontal lines were eventually fixed at 480.

In NTSC, Super VHS could get out to about 400 vertical lines of resolution. Laser Disc could get out to about 410 vertical lines. OTA broadcast NTSC was good for about 300 to 330 vertical lines, or just under 720 pixels, depending on how well the RF end of the visual transmitter was aligned. UMatic could do around 280 vertical lines. And good 'ol "limp dick" VHS could do around 240 vertical lines.

Posted by Bruce McGee (Member # 131) on 07-29-2016, 06:40 AM:

Funai did their best to destroy VHS when they started making the mechanisms. They were horrible designs with plastic parts that stayed under spring load even when at rest.

I still maintain several VHS decks for the archive. None are Funai.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 07-29-2016, 01:08 PM:

I had an enquiry just a couple of weeks ago asking if the cinema could screen NTSC DVD, Yes, and VHS tape, probably, I think I know where there's a machine that still works. My one at home works, but that's PAL only.

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 07-29-2016, 02:11 PM:

ßetamax will rise from the grave!

Posted by Mark Ogden (Member # 43) on 07-29-2016, 03:35 PM:

Super VHS was marginally but visibly sharper that regular VHS, but they both used the dreadful heterodyne color-under modulation scheme (ptui!) that was shared with U-Matic. And while the hardware era may be finally ending, the legacy of the format still lives: I feel pretty confident in correlating the rise of VHS to a decline in interest in video quality in broadcast and cable operations. I remember all too well when in the late eighties the local cable operator finally broke down under pressure and added some cable channels that the public wanted, but that they themselves considered low-profit. They announced that they would add the channels, but that they would be delivered in “VHS quality”. It was a bandwidth saving scheme, but the rationalization from the company was along the lines of “you don’t mind watching a videotape from Blockbuster, so you shouldn’t mind this”. It went on for years until they rolled out their digital/fiber service. Broadcast, the same thing. While prime-time episodic shows still take some care with presentation (mostly to insure ancillary and foreign sales), it’s unbelievable what kind of garbage video TV news puts out these days, what is considered acceptable. The rise of multi-bond cellular/4G systems like Dejero has only made things worse, the philosophy is basically “just put something on the air, no matter what it looks like”, and don’t EVEN get me started on the amount of cellphone video or poorly set-up DSLRs that are used for origination. I can’t even remember the last time I heard the term “broadcast quality” spoken by a producer or director. Has to be twenty years, at least. Some of them can barely tell when a camera is out of focus. It’s just what they were used to looking at while they were growing up.

Posted by Sam Graham (Member # 2889) on 07-31-2016, 02:52 PM:

My last VCR was a VCR-DVD burner duplicator that I used to transfer my VHS collection to DVD. Said player is still in use at Wife #1's mither's place.

The discs are stored in a couple sleeve books in a dark closet. I!ve never had one fail to play, though they don!t get much play to begin with.

Posted by Tyler Purcell (Member # 9213) on 07-31-2016, 05:39 PM:

Ahh yee ol' VHS machine is finally extinct. Sony kept producing Betamax machines into the early 2000's, which was quite shocking really.

Few things to note... standard VHS and S-VHS are both composite formats, with very limited bandwidth, 240 lines and 400 lines respectively. Yet thanks to high-speed duplicators and analog masters, pre-recorded VHS tapes were always garbage. As a filmmaker, I wanted the highest quality image possible and in the 80's/90's that was laserdisc. To this day, I have disks from the mid 80's that look and playback great, far better then any tape from that era. Laserdisc was of course a composite format as well, but the addition of digital audio in the late 80's, dolby digital in the mid 90's and a lower noise floor, meant it was a far better format then even the best consumer tape formats. Unfortunately like all things, laserdisc machines do suffer from "laser sag" which is common in all optical devices. This is when the focusing system of the laser is unable to make perfect/critical focus. Since laserdisc is analog video, there is no correction when things aren't playing back properly. So many laserdisc machines, like VHS machines of the past, tend to stop working as well, which is very unfortunate.

The only really good analog video format was Betacam SP. It was 525 lines in the states, but critically, a complete component based signal, which had much more color separation then composite video. Betacam SP also ran at such a high tape speed and used metal particle tapes, noise and tape hits were at an all-time low. It's truly unfortunate Sony couldn't afford to make Betacam a consumer format, but the heads and electronics necessary for it to work even remotely like their high-end consumer machines, was just too much. Sony's failed ED Beta system, which was 500 lines, is a good example of how better quality didn't mean much in the long run. Even Hi-8 was a semi-failure for Sony in the long run. They spent so much money, to be replaced very quickly by DV in the early 90's.

The reason vinyl is having such a resurgence is mainly due to consumers wanting something tangible, a physical item they can hold in their hands, which is different then what everyone else has. CD's have come and gone, the only thing left is the oldest audio format of them all. Yes, there are many pro's to vinyl, stuff that old analog video formats can't get near. However, considering the number one consumer electronic item in 2015 was record players, those people are not all audiophiles.

On the subject of "revivals", I do think as digital cinema continues it's current path of slow growth and a continuing "digital" look, we will see more and more people choose to work with film. Right now, it's cheaper to shoot low-budget movie on 2 perf 35mm then 4k digital, assuming you're renting equipment. So now there is a great divide between the digital "experimenters" and the people who just want to make movies and deliver a "filmic" experience to those who watch them. So I personally feel film will be the other "analog" resurgence in the near future, to what stopping point, I don't know yet. What I do know is the "retro" and "unique" points of vinyl, are very similar to that of film.

Unfortunately, video tape is dead... [Frown]

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 08-01-2016, 12:59 PM:

It is interesting that you mention that tape dropouts were low on Beta SP. That was definitely not the case in the mid-1990s, when the standard process for making VHS dubs was to dub a Beta SP master to 1" C-type due to fear of dropouts on the higher-density format. Presumably, the generation loss was not considered to be an issue since the product was VHS.

I don't know when and why people stopped doing this (did the SP tape formulations get better over time?), but it was what I was advised to do circa 1995 for a short film project. I still have the 1" videotape, too, though I never had access to a machine to play it. I also have the Beta SP tape on 3M stock, and that plays fine now. I threw away the remaining VHS copies years ago.

From what I have been told, the big breakthrough with component video recording was the ability to do tape-to-tape color correction, which could not be done effectively with the composite formats (where color correction could only be done well as part of a film-to-tape transfer).

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 08-01-2016, 06:09 PM:

quote: Paul Mayer
OTA broadcast NTSC was good for about 300 to 330 vertical lines, or just under 720 pixels

That doesn't make any sense. 720 pixels wide should be 720 vertical lines. Not that NTSC used "lines" in the vertical direction. Unless you're in TATE mode. In reality since NTSC could not have all 525 lines on the screen at once, the actual resolution is half that. You can't count two different moments in time and add them up. That's cheating. Only in progressive scan can you count that shit. Seriously it seems to me that most people don't understand that each field is a different moment in time. You can have 60 completely different images per second (or 59.94 if you wanna be precise).

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 08-01-2016, 08:38 PM:

quote: Joe Redifer
most people don't understand that each field is a different moment in time

Hell, most people haven't got a freakin' clue how it works at all. It's just that big flat thing in the corner they watch shows and movies and stuff on.