So you’re still hanging onto those VHS tapes, huh?

We aren’t here to mock you; we know how it is. It’s hard to throw stuff out, especially when it’s semi-irreplaceable, like your exotic video cassette collection. But for Pete’s sake, don’t keep them on your media storage shelves where everyone can see. Stash those relics out of sight. Otherwise people will think you’re some kind of misguided obsolescence fetishist, sold on the superiority of all analog recording media, no matter how crappy.

Or worse: you might be taken for one of those self-consciously “eccentric” types, like the guy who always wears a monocle, or that joker who rides his unicycle around downtown. Before you know it, you’ll be regarded as just another attention-seeking local quirkmonger. There’ll be “Zoot-Suit Bruce,” who dresses in stinky thrift-store get-ups and convulses like a moron at rock shows—and you, the weirdo with all the videotapes.

That’s not what you’re about. You’re of a practical mind. So stow those clunky old tapes in a drawer, and junk your stand-alone VCR in favor of this compact Philips unit. It does double duty, playing your tapes and discs in the same slim box, so you can still enjoy every video you’ve probably bought or shot since 1985—and your home entertainment center will no longer house an unsightly stack of retro contraptions looking like an exhibit from the Henry Ford Museum.

And—considering it’s a VCR —this is a pretty modern unit, boasting a useful set of features for tapeheads, like VHS time search and VHS index search. It’s got easy one-touch recording to boot.

Someday soon, your videotapes will complete their inexorable march into the forgotten past. Either you’ll replace them with DVD versions, or you’ll transfer them all to your hard drive. Then again, maybe you’ll just box them up and forget about them. Maybe a fire will break out in the long-term storage facility where you rent space, turning your extensive tape library into so a toxic mound of melty black goo. However it happens, when that day finally arrives, you’ll take it in stride. You’ll have this Philips unit—and it was your training wheels for the future.

Now, about your reel-to-reel player…

Back to top