Looking at it. Which is what really matters.

If you want to collect obsolete formats and you have a TV with analog inputs VHS is probably your best thing to get into. This place

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114286077399818803

sells VHS decks for $12 and you can get pretty good movies for $2. Contrast that to compact cassette decks which start at twice that and have a good chance of being non-functional. That place has the complete works of Barbara Streisand but if you want music that anybody would want on cassettes the sky is the limit for collectables.

My impression is that the quality of VHS isn't terrible. The video is worse than DVD of course but a lot of DVDs have NERFed soundtracks because they mixed them assuming you're going to play their 5.1 mix on a 2-channel system. Any deck you get now is going to support VHS Hi-Fi and if you have a 5.1 system with some kind of Dolby Pro Logic the soundtrack of a good VHS can be better than the soundtrack of an average DVD. (Blu-Ray often has better sound not because the technology is better but because the 5.1 soundtrack is more likely to really be a 5.1 soundtrack)

There are a few more things I didn't like about DVD, I don't like the blocky artifacts that you often see in the background (doors, bookcases, etc). Some of the earlier scenes in The Matrix are particularly bad. Fire/explosions are also very poor.

Beyond this, is when they bake a 16:9 movie into the 4:3 format losing significant fidelity. Batman Begins was nearly unwatchable.

This of course doesn't get into the sound quality/mixing issues you mention... I wish they had something closer to h.265 at that time, as I don't mind a blurry background nearly as much as blotchy/blocky artifacts for similar sizes or smaller. A 2gb h.265 movie from blueray looks dramatically better than a 4+gb DVD movie.

> This place sells VHS decks for $12

> Any deck you get now is going to support VHS Hi-Fi

When you say "VHS deck", do you mean something other than a VCR?