Saturday, June 21, 2008

DVD and VHS - Both available at the Disney Movie Club

By Sume Diang

For all the boasting in the home theater world about the superiority of DVD versus VHS, it really amounts to personal preference. Certainly, you do not want to take all the VHS tapes off your shelves and dispose of them like yesterday's 8-tracks. The quality of VHS tapes is proven. There is no convincing logic for abandoning VHS for DVD. Some film clubs, like the Disney Movie Club, continue to offer both DVDs and VHS tapes.

There are boasts that the DVD picture has finer vertical resolution, but that is only true if your television has the ability to maximize on it. If your older television contains a lower standard for vertical resolution, all the higher resolution in the world is useless. In a "blind" test standing VHS and DVD pictures against one another, 63% of the subjects could find no difference, and 16% actually thought the VHS picture superior. Many think the analog sound quality of VHS to be warmer than that of its compressed digital competition. Some have no quarrel with DVD sound.

The question of longevity gets a lot of attention, too. Certainly, there are many individual copies of 101 Dalmatians out there that have been played time and time again without showing any damage. DVDs, however, with the large amount of info stored on them in comparison to a music CD, can be ruined by the littlest scratch.

When it comes to simplicity, the DVD may be a winner, depending on how much you are prone to jump from scene to scene. On the other hand, it is easy to turn on a VHS and let it play. With a DVD, it can be annoying finding the right place. Scene selection, however, is a great advantage of DVD. Anyone who has ever tried to find a specific scene in a VHS movie can attest to the frustration. If price is a factor, VHS tapes are generally a few dollars lower in price than DVD's of the same movie.

To sum up, if you are content with VHS, there is no reason to change over to DVD. That is why the Disney Movie Club offers both options to its members. You can get all their blockbusters and new releases in the format you like best.

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