Beehut

Apologies in advance, but I couldn't find the VHSTalk forum.

My uncle amassed a HUGE collection of VHS tapes (bulk are unopened), he's currently in the process of converting them to DVD (don't ask), then he's done with them.

There is the potential for movies not released on DVD, rarities, etc., so I'm looking for a collector's guide/pricing guide to see if it is even worth checking through the whole collection. Then again, it could be nothing.

Any good sites out there for that? Google is failing me, or maybe the market doesn't exist. A lot of gougers on eBay, hoping for that one buyer to come along, but most priced $100 and above never sell.

Just curious.

Ash Ketchum

I would love to get funding to start a Center for the Preservation of Analog Media, with the emphasis on VHS tape. And audiocassettes. There are tons of things on VHS that are not on DVD. Personally, I don't consider transferring them to DVD to be a good way to "preserve" them. When you weigh the percentages, more DVDs have gone bad on me within a couple of years than VHS within a couple of decades. I feel bad for the people who transferred everything to DVD (including irreplaceable home movies) then threw out the originals only to find the DVDs unplayable after a few uses.

Digital is not the answer, folks.

dx23

I think that 2 unofficial pricing guides can be Amazon.com and eBay. Search the VHS tapes you are interested and you'll see different prices based on condition and scarcity on the tapes. The completed auctions at eBay will also give you an estimate on the potential value of those tapes.

ben12

It's better than VHS. You can back-up a DVD (as many times as you want) and put it on a hard drive and back-up that data to an online server if you want. That's never going bad.

ben12

I wouldn't go with Amazon. The prices you see there are prices at which the tapes have NOT sold, so I wouldn't consider those to be accurate estimates of their value.

Ebay sounds good, but only look at completed auctions.

Beehut

Well going off the completed auctions at eBay, here's hoping he had a wing devoted to WWF/WCW Wrestlemanias, Summerslams, etc.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I do fine at Amazon on things like this. I just lowball the current price which is usually way to high and all the other prices are grouped together, equally as high. Usually within a week, some buyer sees a super low price, compared to the others and I get the sale.

The only other thing I've ever had happen was at least one other seller catches what I'm doing and then beats my price, followed by us battling for the lowest price. If I can get him low enough, I'll buy his item and then raise my price to one that's still significantly lower than the next lowest price.

I'd be really interested in a list of what he has and would possibly be interested in buying more than a few.

Ash Ketchum

Every one of those DVDs will go bad, the hard drive will crash and the online server will crash or go out of business, all while the original VHS tape is still playing fine. Digital media are highly perishable and not good for storage. Your faith in digital is misplaced. I work in a TV station and I see disaster looming as the techies transfer everything from Beta SP tape to digital files.

jjcool

From personal experience, I am going to have to side with Ash on this one. The only time I had a VHS tape fail on me, was when the vcr decided to not let go of the tape. Never did I have one fail to play when I pulled it off the shelf. In that respect, I found VHS to be a very stable medium. I would think that playing a VHS tape an excessive amount of times would eventually wear it out, although I never had that happen. I have had 1 dvd that I know of fail to play right off the shelf. Played fine the first time I played it. Went back to it a couple of years later, and it wouldnt load on any of the machines I tried. Anecdotal evidence I know, but I saw this first hand so it is good enough to convince me.

Now, I'm not saying that EVERY one of your dvds will go bad. But the chance is there. And I believe the chance to be higher on dvd than it was on VHS. All this is assuming that you store everything properly.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I don't have the faith in tapes that others have. I worked with a lady that had tons of rare stuff, including her original recording of the Star Wars Holiday Special. She told me she went out to get a box of the stuff to go through it and the tape was old and just crumbled away.

The last tape I dealt with was for the exploitation challenge, I think. Put it in the VCR and the first thing that happened, after spending time digging out the VCR and setting it up just right, was the tape broke.

I have backups of all the stuff I do digitally. You can only use scotch tape on VHS so much before it's more scotch than movie.

Ash Ketchum

As jjcool pointed out, storing everything properly makes all the difference. Tapes are not meant to be left out in the sun or in a basement or garage. (I wouldn't put discs in a basement or garage either.) Store them properly on shelves indoors away from direct sunlight and they last. I'm currently participating in the Animation Challenge and more than half the stuff I've watched for it is on VHS, some of it decades old.

Damfino

I think Amazon sales works as a kind of "reverse auction". It should be easy to find which VHS tapes are valuable just by comparing the low selling prices. Obviously, a common movie on VHS that has 20+ people trying to sell it for $2 clearly doesn't have the resale value of a rare tape that 2-3 people are trying to sell for $100.

darkhawk

If your VHS is already available on DVD, Your VHS is worth less than $.50. If it's not on DVD and you're wanting to sell an Out-Of-Print VHS, It could bring in some good money. I just sold a new copy, still sealed of Susan Haywood / Bette Davis VHS 'Where Love Has Gone' on ebay. It sold for $15.00. I just check amazon and it's about to be released Sept. 28th. I still have about 30 VHS movies I won't sell until they get released od Blu-ray or DVD.

i86time

Perfect, an investor for my Blu-Ray to VHS archive venture. You can send your funds via Paypal.


Neither are digital/optical discs meant to be mishandled. Don't touch the bottom surface or place it face down in/on anything but the storage case. If you do, clean it off properly. You wouldn't pull out VHS tape from the guard cover, would you.

Yes, recordable optical media can be very sensitive, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't do it's job properly.

Both formats, if taken care of, can last a long time. 0's don't spontaneously mutate to 1's.


You're just being silly now. If everything digital is going to blow up, I take it you've cashed out everything and your mattress is stuffed? Or hoarding gold?

I'm willing to bet that if I decided to 'protect' a DVD I recorded, for 30 years, not only would I have a better chance of finding a suitable playback device, it would look better that any VHS. I can have an infinite amount of cloned backups spread all over the world, whereas you can only have your 1 original tape with degraded copies. The latter sounds like better odds to you?


What would be the point then?

kbarkerok

not always the case, but more times than not.


One of the rarest Vhs titles ' Last House on Dead End Street' sells everytime on ebay, granted it's rarely on, for $280-500

and the out of print dvd with tons of extras goes for $40-80

Horror titles do great, especially Wizard, Midnight Video, and some more obscure labels, like unicorn and such.

Beehut

I would guess in the low thousands. Never married, had a lot of money, felt like he needed to buy 'em all.

Kind of like me with DVDs in college. Minus the "lot of money".

Without seeing the lot, I don't know if he was a collector, or if he was just buying a bunch of movies in the 70's and 80's.

JCWBobC

I sold a VHS copy of Sex and Violence Family Hour, with a young Jim Carrey, on Amazon for $50 recently so you can make a nice amount selling hard to find VHS tapes on there.

gerrytwo

Having actually transferred a ton of VHS tapes to DVD-R, I will say the following:
1. While there is wide variation in VHS tape playback quality and longevity, I have found that Fuji tapes are the best all around and TDK tapes blow chunks, especially their HiFi (which usually has bad audio tracks) and S-HG (which come in gray boxes and will self destruct on you) tapes. If you have a lot of TDK brand VHS tapes, expect trouble. Actually, the name TDK is misleading, since TDK put its name (rebadged) on a lot of low quality VHS tapes. On the other hand, TDK cardboard cassette boxes are made very well, the glue never loosens, unlike the binder glue used to hold the magnetic particles on the tape, which sheds easily under pressure.
2. Most old VHS tapes are worthless. Tapes of TV shows and movies in 220 line resolution are not in much demand when the TV shows and movies are out in higher quality DVD format. There are collectors of old TV commercials, so if you can save those commercials with the recordings, the total package has some ephemeral value.
3. Panaonic made a VHS DVD Blu-ray player that used to be available for $140 at Amazon. A bargain, the VHS player on this unit is super, with a great tracking control. Trouble is, now Amazon resellers want over $400 for it.
4. The best way to convert VHS to DVD-R is to feed the signal into a Panasonic HDD DVD recorder, which can edit the recording stored on the unit's hard drive. Those Panasonics are available here, after the reseller modifies overseas models to play in region 1. See Avsforums.com. Overseas models do not record closed captioning, no line 21 ability.
5. Best of luck.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

It sounds like these are purchased tapes and not recorded, since he says many are unopened.

Ash Ketchum

You're probably right. I tend to err on the side of being over-alarmist and resistant to change (d'uuhhh) so that tends to color my reactions to these things. But I'm curious how all this plays out in 30 years. What happens to everything now being stored in digital media including files? How will that hypothetical "protected" DVD fare in 30 years in the real world? I'm middle-aged and doubt I'll be around in 30 years to see for myself. I have extra VCRs and DVD players in storage so I can watch the tapes and discs I have in the years (decades?) left to me. But will there come a time when computers are made without a slot for disc playback because everything will be expected to have been transferred to files? Will the type of files change over the years? Will something stored on files today be playable in ten years? I don't think it's too early for archivists to address these issues.

There's an article in today's New York Times about a collection of records made of jazz broadcasts in the 1930s and the effort to digitize and preserve them now. It's a fascinating story, but it doesn't go into enough detail on issues of preservation regarding this ancient brand of long-playing disc and how they manage to play them today. Here's the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/ar...?_r=1&ref=arts

And I'd like to add one more thing. A 35mm film print made 100 years ago can still be played on 35mm projectors at multiplexes today. Once films switch entirely to digital projection, what kind of shelf life will those films have?

Alan Smithee

Any 70s-80s porn? Those seem hardest to find nowadays unless they've been reissued on DVD.

bboisvert

That's what she asked.

jjcool

I assume he would buy the title on disc and would no longer need the vhs copy.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

As long as the film itself just doesn't crumble from age. How many film prints from 100 years ago can still be played just fine compared to those that can't?

At least with digital, it's much easier to make and have backups. With actual film, you can't as easily and quickly make 5 copies and do what you want with them.

orangerunner

I think it's smart to archive things to digital and preserve them for now. When newer technology emerges that may be more stable or advanced you can always transfer your backed-up source to that format. The nice thing about digital is that it never gets any worse, quality-wise, than when it was first digitized.

Now, recordable DVDs I am skeptical about some brands. I have recorded some programs onto a DVD five years ago and they played fine when I made them, now just go unrecognized in several DVD players I have tried them on. The disc was well stored in a moderate dry place with no light, not scratched and yet doesn't work.

Stick with a good brand of media (Taiyo-yuden, Verbatim) and don't toss out the original tapes.

Almost all theatrical prints made by Eastman prior to 1983 are already ruined by colors washing out and vinegar syndrome. I'm sure there will always be hobbyists that will keep film projection alive to some degree.