Shola's Home Gadgets

The VHS tape recorder is not dead in my house at least.

In a recent house cleanup, we found some old children's VHS tapes which we hadn't watched for years, and since I have a five and 4 year old boy and girl, we decidec that they might want to watch these Veggie Tales videos which while available on DVD, we wanted to see if our Sony SLV-E720 VCR would still play them since it had been sitting on our consumer electronics shelf for years.

Well plugging in the Sony SLV-E720 into the mains, connecting the SCART cable to the TV and popping the video tape cassette in produced an excellent picture on our CRT TV, so we've been watching some of these old VHS tapes.

It was back in 2005 that Dixons announced they would stop selling VCRs and 35mm film cameras and it is now virtually impossible to buy a Video Tape recorder anywhere.

So the VHS recorder has followed in the steps of the sony betamax, 8 track car music players, vinyl, and the siclair ZX81 to the history books. I will be keeping my Sony VCR for as long as it works, hopefully my electronics background will deal with any minor repairs like cleaning the video heads, though lack of spares will probably mean one day I'll have to give it up totally.

I remember the days when we used to have cassette tape duplicators to produce copies of audio sermons at V2V church, now it is Podcasts and MP3s!