Were there any video rental places in Japan?

I saw this old VHS and it looks like it came from a rental place, so I was wondering if there were any video rental places in Japan.

 

Nice picture...

Hmm video rental places in Japan, er yes. There are still a large number of them around.

Old VHS tapes were generally expensive and did state 'For rental or sale only', with tapes costing about Y5800+ ($60+) each most people did rent them rather then buy them outright...

 

As opposed to?

 

For sale only.

 

I remember buying the Tenchi Muyo Movie on Video 11 years or so ago from Japan. I thought the price said 680 yen. When the guy rang it through the till and asked for 6800 plus tax I was like, WTF ! I couldn't believe how expensive it was. It did have fantastic picture quality mind you.

Why were Japanese video tapes so bloody expensive anyway?

Yakumo

 

The same reason LD and DVD are just as expensive, they are somehow willing to pay up to $120 to own a 70 minute movie if not more for a LE set.

From my few experiences with Japanese rental stores (in SF, LA and NYC), they all rented copies of VHS! I bought a lot of bootleg-rental anime tapes in 1999 for a flat $8/any movie compared to the $30+ American-licensed anime from specialty stores, or the $300 my friend paid for an original LD copy of End of Evangelion.

 

The reason why Japanese tapes were so expensive (or the reason a distributor told me) is because the vast majority are made for the rental market rather then sell through. (It was the same in the West, but rental tapes were only for Rental, the quality of the tape is much much better too).

Tapes in Japan hardly sell, so the rental market makes the money for them.

 

That explains why the Tenchi Muyo video I bought made by Pioneer had the best image I'd ever seen on a VHS tape. I was blown away by how crisp it looked. I used my PAL / NTSC Toshiba video to watch it in the UK.

Another thing I noticed is that the quality of Japanese video recorders is piss poor compared to what we had in the UK. I was shocked when I first saw the quality of a Sharp video recorder with 14 heads. It was F*ing awful comapred to my Toshiba back home. Also most videos in japan only do turdy composite!

Yakumo

 

Japanese tapes are generally very good, I have a 20 year tape that still has a fantastic picture and it's just a cheap Megadrive preview tape too.

As for VCRs, I noticed that too, I suppose it's because PAL tapes have a higher video bandwidth so the heads are slightly better so they can read it clearly and this has a drop down effect on NTSC tapes?

 

Jamtex is correct. Back in the day most VHS tapes cost anywhere from $60.00 to $120.00 a piece. It was only movies the studios knew were going to have large volume sales that were priced lower.

As for the quality one of the reasons it can be iffy (especially near the end) was that many studios would simply take old stock back from stores then wipe the tapes and then record their newest movie onto them which I'm sure you know degrades the tape each time. Not to mention the overall quality became worse over time. Hold a tape made in the early 80's opposed to one made in the late 90's and you can really tell the difference.

 

VHS isn't the same as broadcast TV though, it's limited to ~3 MHz so lots of luminance is lost regardless of NTSC/PAL. PAL may be able to recover more chrominance on poor recorders though from the alternating lines, but even the best you can recover is less than 2/3 of broadcast, making me think you guys REMEMBER VHS looking better back in the UK. Recently I watched some VHS movies and done some of my own recording on a JVC deck no less and everything looked like crap.

 

CD market is the same in Japan. You think Japanese pay 3000 yen for all there CDs? Fuck no, they rent->dupe them. Why do you think MD was so popular here.

 

I was comparing Japanese and PAL Video recorders when I lived in both countries so there was no gap. UK video recorders or should I say PAL do have a far better image quality than NTSC :nod: How many NTSC Video recorders give RGB playback options? None that I've ever seen in Japan. Even the highest range models 10 years ago didn't have this option. Just crappy composite or S-Video if you were lucky. Also we can get 4 hour tapes as standard in PAL land.

Yakumo

 

??? No PAL VCRs give RGB "playback options" because VCRs only deal with composite video! If one truly does output RGB (and you're not confusing it for composite over SCART), it's even LOWER quality than composite because it's encoded from composite. A long time ago some VCRs (and LD players) had S-Video output because TVs didn't have 3D comb filters at the time and VCRs once actually did a better job at separating chrominance.