How to buy a VCR in 2024

The most important part of preserving or recording your own VHS tapes, is obviously the VCR. The last VCR was manufactured in 2016, so the only way you can get your hands on one if you don’t already have one, is to get one second-hand. I spent over a month frequently checking the local thrift stores and never found anything. If you happen to want a CRT TV, you may find those hard to find as well. It will largely depend on where you live. It seems like the more rural the area, the more luck you might have.

What does a VCR cost in 2024?

Location is going to be a huge factor when it comes to price but I can provide some averages of what I have seen. First up, check your local Facebook Marketplace, and maybe Craigslist. It is not impossible to find someone locally looking to give away their old VCR to someone who will appreciate it.

A basic VCR at a thrift store or even on Ebay might go for around $30. Sometimes you can find a combo DVD/VCR unit for a similar price, but in both situations, these are typically going to be the most basic models, but you can always get lucky.

If you’re looking for high-quality S-VHS systems or systems with TBCs, it’s unlikely you’ll come across one in the wild. There are typically a few good models on eBay at any given time, but they can go for $200-$800 depending on the model and condition.

What to look for in a VCR

If you have the luxury of choosing your VCR or don’t mind spending a little more to find what you want on eBay, there are a few things to look out for, for optimal playback and recording. I’d highly recommend checkout out this list of what VCRs to look for specifically, it’s from a famous forum post that goes into detail about what the best VCRs are and was updated for years.

S-VHS (Super VHS)

Super VHS was the last iteration of the VHS standard and allowed for the best possible quality recording while remaining compatible with standard VHS tapes. S-VHS (nearly) doubled the number of horizontal scan lines from 240 to 400, and was able to record more color and luminance information.

The only issue is, S-VHS tapes are nearly impossible to find. Most movies were not released on S-VHS as you would have needed a S-VHS player to watch them. Still, these were higher quality units produced later in the VCR’s life cycle.

The other benefit of S-VHS players is that most have S-Video output, which carries the luminance and chrominance separately, which should result in a cleaner signal and better image. Some debate that RCA is just as good, so long as what ever you plug it into has a good comb filter.

TBC (Time Base Corrector)

If you read online, you’ll see the die hard digital preservationists will say a TBC is a MUST-HAVE. A TBC or a Time Base Corrector is a digital device with a frame buffer that can re-synchronize video signal that has become unstable. Tape is an analog medium, the tape itself can stretch and shift in the VCR, especially over time. A TBC will stabilize the the video signal and fix a lot of the issues that can appear on an old VHS tape.

If you are recording your own tapes, this might not be as important, but if you are serious about digitizing old tapes, this is a serious consideration. When our video source is digital for creating our own tapes, we can avoid a lot of the issues that a TBC would fix. But if you want to save what’s on a tape before recording over it, a TBC is a good idea.

Why not get a VCR with a TBC built in? Well, they are very rare and exceptionally expensive. I paid over $800 for my VCR, and that was missing a remote and one of its feet. There are some models with TBC that can go for around $400 on the lower end.

Hi-Fi Stereo

Hi-Fi Stereo was around since the mid 80s, but was typically only available on high end models for the majority of the VCR life cycle. Hi-Fi Stereo was one of the highest quality analog audio formats ever produced (for consumers). The sound quality is compared to CD quality, essentially similar to digital audio.

Hi-Fi stereo was also used by Dolby Digital Surround Sound, which encoded extra audio channels on the two Hi-Fi stereo tracks. The VCR wasn’t really all that involved in the decoding process, you would need to pass the audio off to a receiver that had Dolby’s Pro-Logic decoder to get the full surround sound experience.

VCRs without Hi-Fi stereo may only have mono audio, or possibly linear stereo. If you are buying a VCR without Hi-Fi, make sure it does at least have linear stereo. You can typically tell by markings on the front of the VCR if it has Hi-Fi stereo or not. Mono audio units typically only have one audio input.

4-Head / 6-Head

Your typical basic VCR has “2” heads, as described by the original VHS specification. However, with only one of the heads dedicated to recording, it was also tuned for recording at some specific speed. Often these were tuned for EP (Extended Play) speed, which was the slowest speed and allowed for the most recording time on a tape at the cost of quality.

Adding 2 more heads to the VCR allowed for a head to be dedicated to recording at each speed, SP (Standard Play), LP (Long Play), and EP (Extended Play). This allowed for better quality recordings at each speed.

6-head VCRs came into the market in the mid 90s and were really didn’t offer that much additional benefit. The additional heads were used for an improved EP recording mode, which we typically are not going to be using for recording our own higher quality tapes.

A 4-head VCR is essential for improved playback and recording, but the 6-head VCRs were largely seen as a marketing gimmick.