this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Time hasn’t been kind to VHS, because VHS sucked as a format. It had so many flaws, I’m not even gonna bother to list them because anyone who was ever reliant on that format is already having PTSD flashbacks while they’re reading this sentence. We only used it because it was the best thing available at the time (other than BetaMax, of course, but the licensing fees that Sony demanded for it killed that format before it really got anywhere, and LaserDisk was absurdly expensive, and very cumbersome to handle). The instant a better format came along, we moved along with it.
I could argue that VHS was a superior format to both Beta and Laserdisc because it offered a better blend of features.
Laserdisc offered cinemaphile farkles like perfect pause and frame by frame, additional audio tracks etc. but a movie required at least three sides of a disc, and thus two discs with at least two changes. Laserdisc was read-only and thus useless for timeshifting and camcorders. The tape-based formats were slightly worse in quality but could hold an entire movie in one go.
VHS was superior for timeshift and camcorder use than Beta because of the longer run time. There was a mini cassette for miniature VHS camcorders which could be played back on a standard deck with an adapter, Beta never got there AFAIK and insetad Sony went to Hi 8, which never really took off as a home video format the way it frankly should have. VHS was better than Beta at movie distribution because a longer film could fit on an SP VHS cassette, often with room to spare for some commercials at the beginning which helped subsidize the cost.
VHS was at least capable of everything.
DVD didn't fully kill VHS; It unceremoniously killed LaserDisc and shouldered VHS aside a little. Through most of the 2000s VHS was still going strong, DVD-RAM is surprisingly old but wasn't adopted that widely. Hard drive based DVRs and smart phone based video recording finally did VHS in.
The biggest problem with DVD in the early days was just price. Early DVD players were ridiculously expensive compared to VHS, and the DVDs themselves were also significantly more expensive than VHS tapes. That of course changed over time, as DVD adoption drove the unit prices down across the board. By the time Bluray came around and began to drive out DVD the players had gotten so cheap you could sometimes find them for as little as $25, and DVD movies would regularly show up in discount bins for $5 to $10.
VHS stood for nearly 30 years before it was credibly replaced. Just because something was eventually replaced doesn't mean it was bad. It was an awesome format because it was affordable. You could have always mortgaged a home and purchased a professional deck.
There were plenty of other formats that came and went during VHS. Many took away consumers control of content. Only when flash cards came commonplace was the VHS and the ability to make mix and match your own media replicated.
You could deck to deck make your own tapes if you wanted and edit with scissors and tape.
What an ill-informed take. "The instant" in fact took several decades; between 8mm and DVD this was effectively the de facto format.
It had the same benefit that cassette tapes did: It was trivially easy to record things from live TV to watch later, or to copy VHS tapes you rented. My parents were not wealthy by any stretch when I was a kid, but we did have a dual-tape VHS player for that express purpose.
You couldn’t record to laserdisc, right? My parents had a VHS camcorder with a selling point that it could also be used as a VCR (the recorder hung from a shoulder bag and could be separately connected to the TV). We have a lot of old home videos from that, and I remember us recording programs from the TV too.
Oh, yeah, camcorders could be used as a portable VCR. Thing was, the camcorder my dad bought used mini VHS tapes, so it was a two-step process to transfer them to the smaller tape, and then transfer it back. So the loss in quality from the two-step process was quite noticeable. It wasn’t until we got a second VCR that we could finally have much better quality copies.
I think we got one of those later. The first one they got was a monster of 1980s technology. It looks more like a news camera than anything for consumer use (although maybe not to actual news people).