this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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VHS stood for nearly 30 years before it was credibly replaced. Just because something was eventually replaced doesn't mean it was bad. It was an awesome format because it was affordable. You could have always mortgaged a home and purchased a professional deck.
There were plenty of other formats that came and went during VHS. Many took away consumers control of content. Only when flash cards came commonplace was the VHS and the ability to make mix and match your own media replicated.
You could deck to deck make your own tapes if you wanted and edit with scissors and tape.
It was good for its time, but we need to be careful not to confuse that as an absolute statement rather than a relative one. By modern standards VHS is garbage with many significant problems, it's just at its time everything else was worse. There were certainly many aspects of VHS that were good some even revolutionary, but it also had many significant flaws.
By modern standards, VHS has plenty of advantages too. A corrupt portion of a computer file often means it won't play at all, while a tape will just play apart from that section. Audio and Video are always in sync with a tape - digital files are often out by up to a couple of seconds. A tape is often more robust than a hard disk or a DVD too.
The only downsides of VHS that immediately spring to mind are quality (not that that mattered at the time - it was and is still good enough) physical space (not that I ever ran out of room) and speed of skipping to particular times, and speed of backup. Oh... and lack of togglable subtitles too (not that digital always has those either)
When an objects time was nearly 5 decades that puts a bit of context around it. By modern standards nearly everything from decades ago is garbage.
VHS has many competitors, but they were too expensive to really challenge for regular people.
The quality of the media determined the quality of your experience. Cheap tapes broke and looked bad. The fact that a tape could be rented from blockbuster dozens of times really showed the durability of the media. Many tapes I had were pulled from rental pools and they looked acceptable.