This could be your last opportunity to purchase a brand-new video cassette recorder. Funai Electric, the last VCR maker in Japan, sold only 750,000 of the units last year (down from a peak of 15 million per year) and will cease production at the end of the month, according to the BBC.
Chris Baraniuk, a technology reporter for the BBC, reports, “Some vintage technologies—such as vinyl—have enjoyed a renaissance.”
But he quotes Tania Loeffler, an analyst at IHS Technology, as saying, “I don’t see VCR becoming like vinyl, where a lot of people appreciated the warmness of how something sounds on vinyl. The quality on VHS is not something I think anyone would want to go back to.”
She added that a niche market for accessing VHS content for archival purposes could be affected by the discontinuation of VCRs.
Walt Hickey at FiveThirtyEight speculates, “It’s only a matter of time before a VCR maintenance, repair and resale shop opens up in Brooklyn, isn’t it?”
About the Author
Rick Nelson
Contributing Editor
Rick is currently Contributing Technical Editor. He was Executive Editor for EE in 2011-2018. Previously he served on several publications, including EDN and Vision Systems Design, and has received awards for signed editorials from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He began as a design engineer at General Electric and Litton Industries and earned a BSEE degree from Penn State.