I’m in a technological bind. Today, my trusty Mitsubishi VCR I’ve had for, well I don’t know, but maybe 15 years, finally gave up the ghost. It doesn’t rewind, fast-forward or play. I’m going to call repair places tomorrow, but I have a strong suspicion it will cost more to fix it than it would to buy a new, cheap, planned-obsolescence VCR. But just about the only thing I do with my VCR is record a program here and there, so I don’t even particularly want to buy a new one. Still, there are times when you want to record something.
(That Mitsubishi was a workhorse. It was expensive when I bought it, but look how long it lasted! It weighs about four times the Sony VCR I saw at Best Buy tonight. That puppy was made to last.)
If I wanted to strain my credit card even further, I could go all high-tech. But recordable DVDs are still way too expensive, and the TiVo/Replay market is still in flux (ReplayTV’s parent just went bankrupt). Plus there’s the monthly fee, the phone/internet connection, etc. – hassle and expense. It’s a weird market right now, because VCRs are already almost extinct, but without a mature, affordable product to replace them.
Ideas? Advice?
Howdy, there. Just your friendly neighborhood video store manager here to tell you that 1) VHS is definitely not going away yet (at least in your friendly neighborhood video store,) 2) getting a VCR repaired is almost always as much as buying a new one, and 3) recordable DVD is at least 4 years away as far as cost-effective regular use.
Conclusions? Buy yourself a nice $60 VCR that can record (ShopKo will do,) and don’t worry if it doesn’t make it more than 3 years.
____________
I go now.
I have had a Shopko Phillips VCR for about five years. It still works fine, and I only spent about $35-40 on it. Well worth it!
Adam: Hi, [insert name here], want to watch a video?
[insert name here]: Sounds good.
Adam: I’ll be right over.
Get a cheap VCR.
I’ve had the Tivo+DirecTV combo for several months now, and I wouldn’t go back. Yeah, the market is in flux, and it may go away due to the powers that be deciding that controlling the marketplace is more important than serving consumers, but in the meantime my TV-viewing is so much more satisfying that I don’t really care what the future brings.
But even with Tivo, you probably still want a cheap VCR so you can archive stuff onto it (which the Tivo makes relatively easy to do), rather than consuming your hard drive space with stuff you want to hold onto for the long term.
But seriously, take a tip from Michael Powell over at the FCC: Tivo is “God’s technology.” You can pause or backup at any point in any program you’re watching (using the 30-minute buffer it automatically accumulates), or record a program to disk and watch it whenever, zapping through commercials (timeouts, halftimes…) at 60-to-1 zoom. Phone rings in the last 5 minutes of the Lakers game? No problem. Wife needs you to reach something in a high cupboard for her? Kid has booboo and needs daddy help with a bandaid? Two programs you really wanted to see are scheduled at the same time? Awesome Kubrick movie is being shown at 3:00 a.m.? No problem, no problem, no problem, no problem.
Get the DirectTV+Tivo combination, because you can get the dual-channel receiver that lets you decode two channels at once. Make sure you’re in an area with local channels in the satellite feed, though, or commit yourself to scamming the good people at DirectTV to get that (which isn’t hard).
Praise Tivo! Amen.
There are a vast number of movies which are not yet available on DVD. You own some of them. There is more to view than TV.
cheap vcr. yup, they’re all right. recordable dvd’s – i know folks who have them, and the only ones happy don’t care about quality, so defiantely not worth the money.
Samsung do a dvd/vhs combo machine that is quite good. Thats what I did when I was in the same situation as you describe recently. Nice to have dvd, but with all the vhs I own let alone the huge rental stock and the recording angle it seemed the best way to go and over these past six months it has been.