The Death of VHS and Plain Old DVDs
I miss watching movies on VHS. Since July of last year, most major film studios have stopped releasing new film titles in that format and opted for DVD-only releases instead. Nowadays, my family?s VHS player is used to record the World News on ABC so that my mom could watch it when she gets home from work. The collection of VHS cassettes that my dad built up during the nineties has suffered imprisonment in a giant Tupperware chest.
I remember spending a lot of my early childhood with Betamax. I actually liked it more than the VHS format. It was compact and Sony branded (which, as a kid, I used to think of as the best in everything electronics related). My parents eventually switched sides and thought that we would get more bang for the buck with the VHS, along with the majority of the American population.
The parallels between the VHS/Betamax war and the Blu-Ray/HD DVD war are pretty obvious. Sony, which backed and failed with Betamax in the eighties is trying to corner the high definition DVD market with the Blu-Ray format. I?ve witnessed Blu-Ray in action and I was heavily impressed. In fact, my jaw dropped when I watched the clarity of the famous car chasing scene in “Bullitt” and the even sharper images of “Happy Feet.”
Unfortunately I haven?t tried out the HD-DVD format yet, so I can?t formulate an opinion as to which one is better than the other. When regular DVDs started getting popular a few years back, I was blown away at how sharp the picture quality was of whatever film I was watching. June 15, 2003 marked the time when DVD format became more popular than VHS in the US.
Less than a decade later, the next generation of home-viewing entertainment is getting underway. Who knows who?ll win the video format war of this decade? I?m putting my bet on this chip being developed that allows both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats to coexist in one system.
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I love DVD’s and I think Bluray sucks for now cause who really has a blu ray dvd player?