Older people in Hungary may have plenty of memories when it comes to VHS: shopping trips to Vienna; recordings of weddings or school leaving celebrations, which relatives forced on us against our will; the clumsiness of inserting a cassette not knowing whether to push manually or wait until it is automatically done; fast forward, which stretched tapes; deterioration of quality after viewing a tape many times; eaten up tapes; spectacularly poor quality of repeatedly copied recordings.

Apart from perhaps today's ads of converting VHS to DVD, younger ones may not even be familiar with the technological standard that was established in the mid-1970s. After an initial industrial use, the VHS penetrated homes in the 1980s as the fundamental device for home video. VHS or Video Home System was developed by the Japanese company JVC. It was the standard format applied to magnetic tapes in use at the time, and it dominated markets and homes for at least a generation.

It seems that the slow death of the technology is finally over as the Japanese company Funai Electric, which was the last firm to manufacture devices that played VHS tapes, announced that it would cease production at the end of the month. The reasons are obvious: product sales have dropped, and it has become increasingly difficult to manage production.

Funai Electric entered the market with VHS players in 1983 following the unsuccessful launch of its own CVC format in 1980. Funai sold fifteen million VHS recorders annually in the heyday, but this figure dropped to 750 thousand last year, which is practically the demand from fanatics. Today the rival is no longer the DVD or Blu-ray, but modern computer-based technologies that offer far more options.

Source: itcafe.hu/hir/vhs_funai_vege.html