Off House and their Tape Fetish

I was having a look around my local Hard Off today when I spotted these.



They are movies on Video8 tapes. Looks like Sony were trying to launch batshit insane ideas in the past too. Surely the image quality on one of these tapes would have been no better or worse than standard VHS? Plus you'd need a whole new player to use them. Oh well, at least the Mini Disc was a fantastic idea. Funny that Sharp players were the best though.

Has anyone actually seen one of these Video8 tapes in action?



Yakumo

 

Interesting, I never knew movies were released in Video8. My only experience with the format is through my old RCA Proview camcorder. If its quality is anything to go by, then it should be at least on par with standard VHS.

 

During the 80s the two main formats in the camcorder war were Video8 and VHS-C, generally Video8 was better then VHS-C in terms of time and audio and had a few extra lines but VHS-C could be whacked into a adaptor and played on a VHS player. To combat that Sony did release a number of Video 8 VCRs so people could play their camcorder tapes without having to hook up the camcorder, they also released Video8 tapes as you see above, although Video8 players did not offer any advantages over VHS players and quickly died off. Video8 records the audio in strips helixially where as VHS records it across the tape like audio tapes, the advantage is that the audio is harder to damage, especially if the tape edges get worn, the disadvantage is that audio dubbing is not as easy...

 

Not to change the subject, but wow didn't know the movie "Class" got a release in japan.