Blasty wrote:
I do have a Laser Disc machine, and I like it. Remarkable quality for a pre-DVD format. And the video being entirely analog; it doesn't freeze up on you and become a stubborn piece of sh** if there's a small scratch on it like a DVD does.
i've found that sony DVD machines handle scratched/faulty discs with the least trouble. panasonics are a distant second-best in that regard, and every other brand hangs up on the tiniest disc flaw.
VHS tapes are not too durable, i have lots of drop-outs on some decade-old tapes. i've found that in dubbing them to DVD-R, i've had to contend with lots of snow and dropped frames and other TB garbage. i wish i could afford a video editor with picture repair facilities. i've found that compact [audio] cassette tapes also don't age well, they are prone to developing drop-outs and generally have fugitive trebles after a decade or so, even in good storage conditions [uniform humidity/temperature] indoors. the fugitive trebles are a phenomenon of slow tape speeds [below 3&3/4 inches per second] as well as narrow track widths, this has been known about since the late 60s. also, cassettes recorded on different machines will not always play back properly, they may have relative azimuth errors resulting in dulled/drifting trebles, and if they were recorded on autoreverse decks, all bets are off! all in all, amateur quality analog is a PITA. i've been digital since the 90s and i don't miss wow/flutter, scrape flutter, modulation noise, hiss, roar, clicks/pops, drop outs, azimuth errors et al one tiny bit!
anyways, DATs are even worse, they are a royal PITA! the machines have heads that only last a few thousand hours at most, and which start getting drop-outs at a thousand hours, even with cleaning. both my DAT recorders have kaput heads, luckily i still have a playback-only unit that i can save my remaining unarchived DAT recordings with. even CDRs are not perfect, i am getting increased block error rates in my early 1990s discs, which means i have been somewhat busy migrating the materials from these old discs onto newer discs, with a lot of audio repair work on some of the files. IMHO, digital files stored on non-volatile memory chip media are the only way to go, as long as some too-clever egghead conglomerate doesn't decide to make a designed obsolescence scenario with new OS that aren't backwards compatible. i have to keep a windows 98 and XP computer around for a lot of my old files that will not work with W7.