The end of an era ... I guess?
VHS has not been commercially viable for a long time and I was honestly just as shocked when the last players were made as I was when LD players ceased manufacture in 2008 or so. I guess I am the only weirdo who still has older, functioning VCRs and hits up the thrift shop (well, Goodwill) for the occasional extra.
Funny note/anecdote: My friends and I had kicked around the idea of a panel/event at conventions about not just re-living the bad-old-days of anime fandom by having us tell the audience about them but the audience had to then daisy-chain a couple of VCRs together to make a fansub copy for "their club". One friend and I went to the show we co-founded (but weren't working other than running panels) and ran it; everyone wound up having lots of fun, mostly because we shared our own bizarre anecdotes about tape trading while our hapless contestant was running cables. Looking forward to doing it again sometime.
But other than that, I am fine with VHS being a footnote of convention topics, of them being confined to plastic bins and only occasionally coming out when my buddy is over and we're throwing darts and want to watch Macross 7.
DKop wrote:The only reason I still get VHS now is that they are a cheaper alternative to getting something on DVD if it hasn't came out on DVD already or is well out of print. My Angel Cop VHS is sufficing till Discotek put it out on DVD (because I know they will). If you wanna make a decent attempt to compare old video formats to DVD, Laserdisc comes in kinda close. Laserdisc to me is my vinyl collection to audio hipsters, and at least with getting Laserdisc you have some really interesting artwork and case styles than say VHS. I can't defend a VHS style if you hold up a DVD release of Dog Soldier compared to the CPM VHS release. Its laughably bad to this day.... and I do own that, because I've never seen Dog Soldier on DVD.
LD used to be that cheap alternative for a while, and not just in the days of "it's in our back-catalog, let's release the DVD so it generates revenue again". But something happened - the Market Bust, realizing a new market, or something - that caused LD prices to, what I would consider, skyrocket. I bought
Macross: Do You Remember Love for $5; now it's $15. Still cheap (I bought each Gunbuster LD for $15 on a whim) but not what I remember paying nearly a decade ago when people just wanted rid of the things.
LD, to me (which is why I put up with them), are the quintessential period way to watch 80s and 90s anime - they were the best way, in terms of A/V quality, to watch something. Plus, you never eroded your material each time you watched it, which VHS (and Beta, to my recollection) did. The one major problem I've ever found from LD was Laser Rot, which only affected a subset of manufacturers. Char has some good points about the difference in appearance and sound compared to DVD/BR versions of movies of that time period but to me, the only thing LD has over any of them is packaging real estate, which is absolutely fantastic, until you have to move them (which is why I am not buying any more until after we move).
llj wrote:I definitely understand the laserdisc fans--the larger artwork and other extras they included often aren't found in DVDs and BDs, plus in a few cases the laserdisc versions are better than the DVDs, or were the source masters for DVDs (Project A-Ko comes to mind). There's a lot of appeal to LDs even today.
I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but as someone who owns Project A-ko specifically on VHS, LD and DVD (all CPM's, no imports), and the DVD is the best looking and sounding of the three.
