Nostalgie De La Tape

As DVD continues to pummel the sales of VHS, the latter’s nostalgia value is beginning to soar, according to Delaware Online.

No VHS nostalgia for me though–it’s strictly a utilitarian format that I’m glad to see fade into the past. I’m happily (if all too slowly) burning onto DVD-R and DVD-RWs as many of my old VHS tapes as possible, if they contain material that’s unlikely to be commercially released onto DVD. I’m doing the same with my old laser discs as well, although their picture quality is definitely better than VHS.

One thing I hadn’t realized was just how far DVDs have overtake VHS in the rental market:

In Blockbuster’s second quarter, VHS rentals accounted for 4.7 percent of total rentals at company stores worldwide, Hargrove said. DVD rentals made up 84.5 percent, with the remainder coming from game rentals.

For someone like myself who remembers the late 1980s, when there were only about a million laser disc players in the US (and getting new discs was often a matter of mail order, or drives to the Big City), that’s an amazing figure.