Which VHS Player To Buy?

[Boot_WB]

Also, as much as VHS suffers from low quality, DVD isn't that good either. It doesn't progressively degrade over time the way VHS does, but it does inflict craptastic MPEG-2 compression on the picture, and it just gets worse the more footage you try to squeeze onto one disc.

One of the first films I watched on my first ever DVD player was Fellowship of the Ring, and was instantly struck by the crappiness of the black gradient banding (it may even have been a single-disc rental DVD of the cinema release).

It's a long time since I owned a VCR though, and I don't miss them.
I did have a good (Toshiba iirc) one back in the day, but it ended up needing a head replacement and never made it through of surgery... horrible machines to try to service/repair.

[Boot_WB]

Nup. It was a crap conversion. The scenes in Moria looked over-saturated and it made the effects look mediocre. BluRay theatrical looks great however.

No dispute there, and I wasn't saying that DVD is intrinsically worse than VHS, however that's my lasting impression of DVD (as the bright shiny uncorruptable future that replaced VHS). A little unfair to DVD perhaps given that it was a ~3 hour action movie that really needed to be high bitrate crammed onto a single disc.

Exactly the same pros and cons as digital storage vs Vinyl when it comes down to it: Sacrificing depth and texture for a more stable storage/playback medium.