Watching VHS tapes in 2025 is an eye-opening experience

Summary

Nostalgia can’t win here – Way too many sacrifices in picture quality – Technology has advanced too far.
VHS has too many downsides compared to modern options.
It’s better to watch new versions of the same movie.

I can remember watching the Star Wars Special Editions on VHS over and over again as a kid when I was growing up, and at the time, I loved them. Eventually, I switched over to DVD, then to Blu-ray, and now I do most of my at-home viewings on 4K Blu-rays. Each format represented a big step up from the last, and with the way physical media is trending, 4K might be the last stop on the train — despite some encouraging signs here and there.

While VHS worked for a good chunk of my life, sometimes things are better left behind. Nostalgia is a real thing, but I don’t think it applies here. I’ve recently modded a classic handheld device, the Game Boy Advance, to play many games I missed out on in the past, and I’ve been enjoying that. Although these games are 20+ years old, there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be had. I don’t think that’s a thing for VHS.

Samsung QN900D 8K TV with a person walking across a desert

I don’t care how thin a TVs is anymore, I just want this missing feature back

Whether or not that’s likely anymore is another matter.

Nostalgia can’t overcome this one

Way too much is sacrificed

I’m sure this will upset a lot of people, but I don’t think VHS is a viable format anymore. Sure, it’s nice as a novelty, and there are still modern movies being released on VHS, A24’s I Saw the TV Glow and Y2K as some recent examples. I’ll admit that collecting VHS tapes is a fun hobby, especially since you can find them for dirt cheap these days. I picked up a lot of 10 movies on eBay for 99 cents plus shipping, but I’m not sure that I’d want to spend any more than that in the future.

I found a CRT TV in the trash that has a VCR and DVD player attached, and surprisingly, both of them still work. I didn’t have any VHS tapes to test on it, which led to me buying some on eBay, and the result was worse than I could imagine. Even though I was on hardware specifically designed for the VHS tapes, it was still a grainy and low-resolution mess. Even though DVDs top out at 480p, they fared far better on the 30-inch TV, and if I had to watch something on the TV, that’s what I’d pick.

The one thing that’s working in favor of the VHS tape is the sound, but it’s not because of the tape itself. The TV I found has a set of stereo speakers built right into it, and they absolutely blow away regular TV audio. That’s nice for my basement TV, but I’m certainly not putting a 30-inch TV in my living room any time soon. VHS tapes also don’t have modern audio formats such as Dolby Atmos, so they are very much of their time.

The bigger issue, by far, is the picture quality. VHS tapes don’t come anywhere close to comparing to even a DVD, let alone a 4K disc, and that’s why it’s very hard to give them a recommendation in 2025. If something’s only available on VHS, that’s one thing, but if you have the option to pick it up on practically any other format, it’s worth it.

I’ve been getting into thrifting a lot more as of late, but based on this experience, I’m going to limit myself to DVDs as the earliest format, and even then, I don’t think I’ll be picking many up.

I went to a Retro GameStop and was surprised by what I found

Retro GameStop stores are now a thing.

Technology has advanced too much

Some things age well, some things don’t

Technology advances quickly, and gaming is a clear example of this. Just a few years ago, Cyberpunk 2077 was looked at as the pinnacle of graphics, and now it’s something that runs natively on the handheld Nintendo Switch 2. Hardware is constantly advancing, and it’s making things that were once dreams into realities.

I think that’s a big reason why I look down upon formats like VHS. There are just so many better ways to watch a TV show or movie that popping in a tape doesn’t make any sense. Top Gun was one of the tapes I picked up, and although the movie itself is the same, there’s no reason for me to go back and watch it on VHS when I can just watch my 4K copy of the movie. It looks better, sounds better, and I don’t have to rewind it when I’m done watching.

This same line of thinking applies to games. Remasters and remakes are so prevalent nowadays that it makes little sense to go back to older versions. It’s one thing when it’s Donkey Kong Country on my Game Boy Advance compared to the SNES, but when we’re talking about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on my Switch 2 compared to the Wii U, why would I ever go back to the latter? In some cases, these re-releases are nice because they often cause the price of the older game to drop in value, Xenoblade Chronicles X, for example.

VHS tapes aren’t typically expensive at all these days, so if you’re a collector, they aren’t anything that’ll break the bank aside from some outliers. One such outlier is old wrestling pay-per-views. I currently have a subscription to Peacock, where I get to look back on pretty much every WCW and WWE PPV I can think of, but those rights aren’t going to last forever, and if they shift to Netflix, then I don’t have much hope they’ll ever get uploaded. I’ve been looking up PPV tapes from the ’90s, and I was surprised to see how expensive some of them still are on eBay. Of course, the seller comes up with the price themselves, but since these tapes are rare as they are, there’s not much I can do except haggle or hope for a price drop. Strangely, the one wrestling tape I did pick up looked a lot better than Top Gun, so it has that going for it.

At the end of the day, I don’t want to yuck your yum if you like collecting or watching rare VHS tapes. I might still pick one up for the right price, but I’ll stick with newer formats where I can. Unfortunately, I think the VHS format is better off as a memory instead of something that I watch in 2025.