Wolfgang

I think I still prefer having physical collection to just having all my films stored on some harddrive. If you scratch one disk at least you can replace it.

samkydd

VHS recorders are so cheap now that I've bought two new ones for £30 each from MAKRO and put them away still in their boxes.

I am not a huge fan of DVD, I think if you watch them on a decent telly with a surround sound system, great, but I watch most of my films when I go to bed early so it's normally a standard TV, a VCR and no sound system.

I have many video tapes still and have no intention of playing the consumer spending game and replacing them all with DVDs. I refused to do it with vinyl records to CD, and now my argument that vinyl sounds better than CD is bearing fruit because more and more people seem to agree.

I watch mainly older films, 1930s to 1980s, and I can't believe that there is much improvement in the quality on DVD over VHS, especially with old Will Hay and Ealing black and whites.

"...the chairman of Littlewoods stores made a Keynote speech!"

Wetherby Pond

You're not comparing like with like, because while a vinyl LP is quite capable of resolving sensational sound quality if played back on suitably high-end equipment, not even the finest VHS deck in the world can resolve more than about 250 lines of information - half that of a typical DVD.

It depends on who's doing the mastering - Studio Ca nal, who own the Ealing catalogue, have tended to be pretty lazy and aside from the convenience factor (though this is a pretty major plus in itself - I can't watch VHS tapes in bed on my laptop!) there's not much in the way of dramatic improvement.

But the best Powell & Pressburger DVDs from Criterion, Carlton and the BFI (whose The Edge of the World has a reference-quality black-and-white picture) are something else again - there's no way you can match the quality of Criterion's The Red Shoes on VHS because even aside from the picture resolution issues, VHS simply isn't capable of resolving strong colours to that degree of fidelity.

And of course with widescreen material a good DVD should piss all over VHS from a very great height, anamorphic compression adding roughly a third more detail again. Compare the Superbit transfer of Lawrence of Arabia with the VHS - there's no contest whatsoever.

samkydd

You're probably 100% accurate in what you say but I can't justify replacing all of my favourite movies with DVD versions. It won't be too far down the road before you'll just have a fileserver at home with loads of downloaded movies and audio stored, and your TVs and hi-fi linked via a LAN, and physical media will become obsolete altogether!

"...the chairman of Littlewoods stores made a Keynote speech!"