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?”
