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From: ables@ut-ngp.UUCP (King Ables)
Newsgroups: net.video
Subject: Re: If one is good, two must be better!
Message-ID: <944@ut-ngp.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 19-Sep-84 11:42:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: ut-ngp.944
Posted: Wed Sep 19 11:42:29 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Sep-84 03:08:44 EDT
References: <4681@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Organization: U.Texas Computation Center, Austin, Texas
Lines: 33

Re: Buying 2 VCRs

If you're going to buy two, do get one fancy and one very base one.
I owned two VHS VCRs for a while.  I found that I'm picky enough about
my picture that even copying it once degrades the picture enough that
I wasn't pleased.  However, I also use the 6 hour speed because I'm
too cheap to use any other.  A one-time recording at SLP (6hr) is fine
for me, but a copy came out a little grainy.  I also figured out that
I didn't use it to copy nearly as much as I would have thought (I also
own two audio cassette decks and copy with them a lot).  But that may
just be me, not you.

The one really useful thing I can say is I would not buy one Beta and
one VHS.  On the surface, it sounds logical, you can play any kind of
tape from someone else, if you need it in a different form you can
copy it off, it'll be great, right?  Maybe.  I think it will invariably
happen that you have something on VHS that you want to copy onto another
VHS (thus requiring 2 generations of copy rather than one, degrading the
picture even more).  If you plan things right you can get around this.
If you tape a football game and want it on VHS w/o ads, tape it on Beta
first and then edit it onto VHS.  But the unforseen can still happen.
The other problem is you have to keep twice as many tapes lying around.
Well, maybe not TWICE if you consider one of them to be your major VCR
then you keep more of those, I guess.  It just seems like a lot of
trouble considering how widespread both formats are, I don't think there's
that much advantage to having both.

However, my needs/opinions may not be the same as yours, so consider
the source.
From someone who used to own 2 and now owns 1:
-King
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