Long Live D-VHS
Dear Gary:
Is D-VHS® so far in the past that it deserves to never be mentioned in the pages of Widescreen Review again? I subscribed to WSR several years ago because, to my knowledge, it had more to offer on the subject than any other source. It seems especially appropriate to me that it deserves occasional coverage, even today, in light of the stupid war that was going on between Toshiba and Sony. Before I got a DISH Network account, my cable box had a FireWire output on it that let me record movies and programs to D-VHS for later viewing and/or archiving, which I did. Not as easy as a DVR, but a good place to put stuff you haven’t had time to watch yet and want to save before your DVR erases the old stuff to make room for the new. But, alas, my cable provider was WAY too greedy, so I had to kiss the service goodbye. The best available DISH box does NOT have a FireWire output, so I’m REQUIRED to watch the oldest stuff on the DVR or risk losing it forever. (Can’t we do something to make these DISH providers offer IEEE-1394-equipped boxes like most cable companies do?) I mention all this because it demonstrates what we’ve all been saying ever since D-VHS first became available to us; “Tape or not, it should do well for us HD lovers until such time as we have high-definition DVDs.” I’ll bet a lot of your readers are, like me, still very grateful for D-VHS and what it can STILL do for us in preserving HD content. Perhaps you would consider having one of your experts tell us D-VHS owners how to get those machines to store Sony’s 1080 HDV footage as well as it stores 720p from JVC’s camcorders. That would be an excellent start to revisiting the brave little old tape format that could. If you ever do such an article, please notify me by e-mail, as I am always months behind in my tech reading. Long live D-VHS!
Jim Holt Cincinnati, Ohio
Editor-In-Chief and Publisher Gary Reber Comments:
I do believe that D-VHS and D-Theater are “dead” formats. No recorder/players are being manufactured, and there are no further content releases. Still, this is the best consumer videotape format ever and one whose record capability is excellent.
I don’t know what to tell you about what features the DISH Network will or will not offer to support time-shift recording or for archiving high-definition content.
D-VHS and D-Theater served well to educate studios mastering content in high-definition and for home theatre enthusiasts to appreciate the dramatically better picture and sound quality that now is available on discs, whether in the Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD format.
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