Which VHS Player To Buy?

[commodorejohn]

Can anybody give me a good reason to keep using older video storage devices?

Sure - for watching any of the content that's never been released on DVD. There's plenty of content that even the el-cheapo "six films on one disc at a ridiculously low bitrate" companies haven't put out there (find me a non-VHS copy of Invasion from Inner Earth, wouldja? Or Bobobobs? The Littl' Bits?) Or simply because VHS is a super-cheap way to get legal copies of movies now that everybody's dumping theirs in thrift stores...

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. (Really, Laserdisc is the way to go.)

[commodorejohn]

And yes, there are a lot of old releases on VHS that aren't available in other formats, but the playback is still pretty shabby and copying those isn't going to improve quality.

Yeah, but shabby is still a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Personally, I really dig the old TV shows that were shot on film (like the original Star Trek) since higher quality releases are merely a matter of remastering.

No question - but unfortunately, it's not like you can just go back and re-film shows that were shot on video. Again, do you want it in suboptimal quality, or not at all?

[commodorejohn]

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).

Yeah, that was the first time I noticed it, too - it baffles me that nobody thought this was an issue back then.

[commodorejohn]

I've been running into a lot of CEDs at garage/estate sales lately. I've kinda half-considered grabbing a few (there's a pawn shop an hour or so down the road that has a player,) but if I want nifty analogue home video formats, I've already got a cassette deck and a LD player...