What do you like to watch? What you got on your shelf? What are some of your favourite tapes?

I like war movies and also ninja movies. I also like music and pretty girls mainly. A lot of them you can't get on LD.

My favourite tapes are my Enter/Revenge of the Ninja (one of the best movies ever made)/Ninja III set of movies released in Japan by King Video, on heavy duty rental grade tapes, very stable picture and sound. Oh and my 1984 Harmony Gold Macross b**by Trap tape, such a piece of history.

I'm mainly looking to get more Godfrey Ho stuff at the moment, his stuff is so great. Nothing like getting home Friday, lighting your first cigarette of the night, cracking a cold one and putting a Godfrey Ho ninja movie in the VCR. Pure pleasure.

Here's some pics of my collection. I'm also taping all my DVDs to VHS I like VHS so much. Sorry pics aren't so good, sometimes my brain hurts and take pic not so good.

I can’t believe the forum censors b**by Trap. Are Macross big boxes not as acceptable as the Star Wars ones? As a Macross fan I feel that my free speech is being unfairly oppressed.

I watched Boobytrap, the Robotech version, *yesterday*…but on LD because VHS sucks.

I also own Savage Beach and all that dudes movies in a DVD box.

Haha, yeah, maybe if I write "boobytrap" as one word..? oh yeah you did it in the next bit.



Nice. I sometimes forget that the entirity of Robotech "The Macross Saga" WAS actually put out on LD. Incredible. Even the Perfect Collection VHS, with subbed JP eps I dillegently bought ended after only a few (vastly cheaper than LD at the time) tapes..

I wish RT had kept as close to Macross as the first draft did tho. Rick Yamada was kinda dumb tho. Still, I'll never forget watching RT as a kid in the USA. I cried at 7 years old when the announcer on Virginian network TV said "that was the final episode of Robotech.." sometime in 1985 (I think it got pulled during Macross by some kind of censorship movement possibly?). Saw the rest back in my home in Australia when it aired about '87 onwards (kids didn't know what the fu*ck I was talking about when I'd tell em about it in '86).



Cool, yeah the "Sidaris-verse" is pretty cool. Good setup with CIA posing as a delivery service..? I gotta get more of those movies.

The running gags get me. That one guy is the worst shot in the universe and there’s always an RC car, plane, or boat.

The dude really knew how to turn his vacations into movies.

I have only ever owned maybe three or so pre-recorded VHS tapes, and I have actually watched only one all the way through since the early 1990s. Non-Super VHS is and always was a pretty pathetic way to watch video, especially once you saw a laser disc played.

For home recording, I went from Beta to SuperBeta as soon as it came out (in 1985 if I remember right), then to ED Beta (in 1990?), then I did get a Super VHS VCR for recording (on lower-cost tapes) and it also improved standard VHS by having the s-video output for when friends insisted on renting tapes.

That one tape that I bought and watched is the pilot episode of "The Duke", a late-1970s or maybe 1980 TV show with Robert Conrad that lasted only a few episodes. That double episode was apparently released as a theatrical movie in Canada or elsewhere with a different title, and got onto a commercial VHS release as well. I found it on Ebay a few years ago, amazing.

Oh, I also bought and watched E.T. on VHS at midnight on its first home-video release day in 1988, even knowing it would be available soon on Laser Disc. I was -that- anxious to see it for the first time since its release six years earlier.

I finally got rid of the last of my tapes recently. Captured all the ones that are not (and I will assume will never be at this point) on other formats before doing so.

Yeah I'd agree about a good S-VHS maximising PQ on standard tapes. I can play some tapes on my standard deck that are just a mess of fuzz and unwatchable. Same tape in my SLV-R5 SVHS deck can look perfect. It's not the something wrong with the standard deck either, it plays most tapes fine.

No, you've killed their beauty by taking the RF and making it a compressed digital file or just an imitation of the original signal. Shame.

Had a bunch more. Still have these:

Pretty cool man, that last pic has big cool factor. I'm not into horror but I love your Sci Fi titles I love those simple Paramount ends, seem more archival. That is a rad VHS caddy for the card boxes too. What's the origin of that caddy? Wild Bunch LD Box is super cool too. That looks fat - CAV? I guess I could just look it up but its more fun to have a conversation. I always think about forum threads as if we're standing around in person at someones house or something discussing their stuff...

The only description/name on those is: "Video Bank. Optimal Storage". Found it on one of our local auction sites. The guy had two for sale so I bought both of them.

Yeah that Wild Bunch is the "Special Edition". Nice photomag and soundtrack CD included in that.

Man cool. I want an account with the Video Bank now..it sounds and looks very... optimal...love that brown too..I'll have to hunt down Wild Bunch Special Edition. I have everything Pekinpah ever did on SVHS that I dubbed from my DVDs but The Wild Bunch deserves LD ownership! And I want to listen to that CD and read that book...and I want something that cool on my shelf too..cool..

Now I don't have to worry about them degrading though. Some were already in bad shape.

But you have an undegraded robot imitation of life, I have real-life beautifully degrading. Just like humans are beautiful and degrade, even ugly ones and those who have degraded, because they have a soul. But pretty robots can never be beautiful. Laserdiscs are the supermodels of real video..

Analog video's already a "robot imitation of life." Life isn't limited to a fixed number of discrete scanlines.

Seriously, the best thing about modern digital video formats is how much closer they've gotten to capturing the detail of film than any analog video format ever has.

Why do serious cinematographers still prefer to shoot on real film then? Why don't they just shoot on digital to "capture more detail"?

Wait wait, I can answer (or Quora can):



That's right sportsfans, just as its often commented on that LD video presents more natural colours that's because IT DOES and film also captures more natural colours, not an approximation of them.

So, what you have there on your harddrive is just an approximised grid and an inhuman imitation of the effectively unlimited variation in colour that your VHS tape had once displayed on your CRT.

Some people are like my old housemate who always preferred the "motionflow" setting on his TV. He said "it's new technology so it's better". Oh how I laughed.

Dude, if you're going to conflate film and analog video to argue for analog supremacy, you've completely lost the plot. I didn't even say digital was better than film.

Its all a faux pas