How much did VHS tapes cost in the 80s?

All this stuff was made in high cost countries in the early 80s, manufacturing was still in the US Or Japan at this point and by the 80s Japan was not really a "cheap" country.

That had a lot to do with it. Consumers were not used to getting cheap electronics yet nor was collecting media normalized except LPs and Cassettes (mid-80s). Stuff was expensive and people just didn't buy as much of it.

We had a VCR really early cause my father worked at GE in the early 80s in a TV/VCR/Cable TV division. He got the VCR free I think at work. The only time we got new movies was when one of his co-workers would bring a VCR over and they would hook the two up and pirate movies. FWIW that early VCR lasted 20+ years.. it was built like a tank and I remember tearing it apart in the 2000s along with a broken Samsung from the early 2000s and comparing the two and it was pretty fascinating how things had changed.

I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive. We had the 3 SW movies and Superman 2 and I watched those over and over.

Computer equipment was the same way, just about out of reach for most. My dad moved into network equipment and internet stuff by the mid 80s and we had a PC or Mac almost all the way through the 80s but it was always a loading dock discard that my father would grab from work before the computer went into the trash when they upgraded. I don't think he ever paid a dime for a computer till about 1993. When I went to college in 1995 I bought a laptop and it was an obscene purchase for an 18 year old, I could have bought a pretty nice used car instead.

In me memory it was "Raiders of the Lost Ark" that was released for less than $30 that blew the VHS movie market wide open. Maybe it was "Top Gun" or "E.T." though.

It was pretty crazy though when movies were like $99 on VHS.

Of course, I'm also old enough to remember seeing a single Japanese import of "Wings Greatest Hits" on compact disc for like $300 in a high-end audio store.

And going further off topic, I remember that when the CD was released and cost around $20, the record companies assured us the price would drop to that of the vinyl record (which was often about $12 or so at that time).

There have always been some sort of price games in the entertainment industry. When you have the rights to an artist, finding the same thing cheaper somewhere else just isn't an option.

Well, except for piracy. I also remember a store in the college town I went to that rented records (and CD's?) and sold blank audio cassettes....

He mentions that studios assumed people copied rented tapes, but I have to imagine that was relatively uncommon. Not many people had two VCRs, and by the time VCRs got cheap enough that people started to have multiples, most rental VHS tapes were protected by MacroVision[0] copy protection. Which was relatively easy to bypass if you knew what you were doing but wasn’t something the average home movie viewer was going to bother with.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Protection_System

I worked at a large VHS duplication facility in the 90s. The largest branch of my company had a facility that had 5000 VCRs. The facility I worked only had around 1200 VCRs. All of the equipment involved to make it all work was crazy, but cool to someone in the engineering side. Lots of video distribution amps were involved, but there were other pieces of gear that most people would never even know about. We had gear that would inject other signals/data into the video on the tape. The most obvious was Macrovision encoders, but we also could insert a code in the blanking that would tell us what shift the dub was created and which bank of decks were used to make the recording. Most dubs were created from proper masters going back from 3/4", 1", BCSP, Digibeta, D1, D2, etc. From time to time, we would also get VHS/SVHS "masters".

The coolest thing to me was the high speed duplicators. VHS tape came to us on "pancakes" which were large spools of tape with thousands of feet of tape. The dub master was an 8-track type of system where you had the exact amount of VHS tape for your content that was spooled so that it wound back on itself with no rewinding. The company I worked for received a patent on this. At the beginning/end of the content were some cue tones. The high speed duplicator would run the blank stock from the pancake very very close to the tape from the 8-track wound "master" with both tapes passing through a magnetic field. This field would align the particles on the blank tape source. It was the closest to digital clone VHS could, and avoided generation loss in the dub. The high speed would run the entire pancake in a matter of minutes. IIRC, 45 minutes of content took 15 seconds in this system. The recorded pancake was then sent to a VHS tape loader. It would start at the end of the pancake and load the blank VHS cassette by rewinding directly from the pancake until it heard the cue tones where it would splice and move on to the next cassette. You could sometimes hear these cue tones at the beginning or end a tape depending on if the splice was pre/post cue tones.

The same pancake could be sent directly to the loader as blank stock and a preset length of tape was loaded so that we could have inventory in 5m, 7m, 10m, 12m, 15m, 20m, 25m, increasing by multiples of 5m up to 180m tapes. Using the dubbed pancake cut exactly to content duration was the most efficient use of tape, but some dub orders did not need a large enough quantity to justify the dubbers. That's where the large number of VCRs were used to make dupes the old fashioned way and we would choose the tape length closest to the content duration.

One thing the author doesn't do in this comparison is factor in the perceived technology value.

While you can adjust for inflation to get the price of a VHS tape in 2022 dollars ($23) and say that it's high, to someone in the 1980s just having the ability to record a TV show or movie and watch it forever at home was considered a huge leap in technology, and well worth the value. Today, however, we take that for granted, which means that the inflation-adjusted price of a VHS tape seems absurdly high.

My dad ran several video stores from about 1988 to about 1994. He even bought out the earliest video store in our town - Hollywood Video - and switched the name of all stores to Hollywood Video. He got out of the business when the national chain wanted to come to town and offered him a ridiculously low price for all the stores. Sadly he took their first offer. They didn't care about the stores, they just realized they couldn't win any trademark infringement lawsuit against the owner of a store that at one time rented beta tapes and laserdiscs only after you paid a steep membership fee.

In the first years, the blockbuster movies would cost him about $65 each to buy and they did creep up over the years. While in theory you could rent them several times per week for about $3, in reality the newest releases (maybe less than a month old) only completely rented out on the weekends. It was hard to get most people to walk into the store to get a deeply discounted new release most weekdays. Once the movie had been released for a month or so, most almost-new-releases would have some copies that sat on the shelf on the weekends too.

The "sell through" movies - those that sold retail at $15 - $30 - were better. He would buy a large number of them and they would rent well for a few weeks. After the initial flurry of heavy rentals for a few weeks, he would start to sell them off. I think there was a small profit - better than the expensive movies which were almost always money losers.

Then there was this small little box in the corner (or under the counter in one location) where some other movies were kept. The movie cases for maybe 50 movies were all collapsed. Each of these movies rented for nearly the same cost as a new release, with little discounting for old titles. $30 was a very expensive one, most were about $15. They would rent well throughout the week, mostly to very loyal customers. There was only ever one copy of each title per store and the stock rotated between stores with occasional swaps with stores owned by others in neighboring towns until the movies wore out. Certain portions of scenes would wear out before others, presumably due to replaying action shots. Had it not been for this little box of porn occupying maybe 10 square feet of a 600(?) sq ft store, he would have been out of business long before Hollywood Video threw him a lifeline.

Ah, memories. I took job in 1985 at Skyline Video near the World Trade Center at Trinity Place. We sold videos, blanks, and rented movies and big, big VCRs that people would rent for the weekend ($80 or $100 IIRC) or a night($60). Andy was the owner, and Jim and Howie were his partner and manager. If any of you recall anything about that store, or the workers, I'd love to hear about it. Good times watching videos after work, bringing home a VCR, if available, to my family with three videos! We were at the poverty line for many years, so this was a very special treat. Living large in the 80s!

I like the tone of the article describing vhs has some mystical artifact of antiquity (I’m old).

trailers and reviews on demand weren’t a thing when vhs rentals were common. All you had to go on was the cover of the box and the description on the back. It was a roll of the dice renting a movie you hadn’t seen before.

Please be kind and rewind.

> The cost of VHS tape in the 80s is one reason I think VHS tapes are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic for their video games than for movies, at least for now.

They're an overrated collectible. There's no great quality-of-media benefit to VHS tapes, versus say the audio record market (where there is an argument in terms of the audio experience).

People are in fact quite nostalgic for movies, not VHS tapes. The author is confused on the difference.

Nobody is buying Ikari Warriors 1/2/3 (old NES games) for $50 on the PS5 today; but people have been buying Top Gun on DVD, then Blu-ray, then 4K, and paying retail prices to do it. They do it because there has generally been a quality increase. The rare exception is a few hyper popular games from the past that eg end up on Steam (Final Fantasy 1/2/3/etc games, or Age of Empires) or on a Nintendo repackaging hardware device.

Most NES video games for example were not endlessly repackaged with each generation of video game machines. The companies make new games, the old games largely stay in the past (in part due to the vast improvement in the quality of the games, the graphics, the size of the games, etc). The same is not true of movies. I can buy a superior copy of the movies The Color of Money or Heat on disc today vs the same movies on VHS, and that's why nobody cares about collecting VHS tapes, the same exact movies are reproduced at often dramatically better quality vs the past. They're not merely reproduced, it's typically a superior offering (certainly moving from shoddy VHS tapes to modern discs, when they're done well by the studio, is a vastly superior consumer experience).

I've recently fixed a VCR from the 90s, connected it to a TV from the 80s (I collect retro stuff..), put some old VHS tape and I must say that the experience is really enjoyable - the whole mechanical operation and even the poor quality. VHS tapes have a distinct look and sound that can affect the perception of a movie, especially horrors seem more scary because the picture isn't as clean and sharp which helps hide any imperfections that would otherwise ruin the illusion of "realism". It's similar to vinyls - you wouldn't want to use it daily, but from time to time it's fun to do something "the analog way" :-)

My first official job as a teen was working in a video rental store. Indeed, new movies cost $40 to $80. Blank tapes came in different supposed quality levels (similar audio cassettes), and cost $5-$10 apiece. Writable CDs were also quite expensive at first. But floppy disks were also expensive at first.

Video rentals, before Blockbuster, cost $1-$4 depending on whether it was a new release and other specials (like rent 3 for a discount, etc.)

As VCRs got more powerful, and rewinders came into existence, periodically a tape would get ripped off one end of its spool. Then it was a task to open the tape and do some minor surgery to fix it. And of course, some tapes were designed to be difficult to open, having permanent rivets. Those were solved with a dremel and some careful work. When the tape costs $80, it's worth an hour of teenager time to fix.

We have it so much better now with streaming, although our appetites and consumption levels have grown so much that we often lament "having nothing to watch".

> The cost of VHS tape in the 80s is one reason I think VHS tapes are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic for their video games than for movies, at least for now.

Ugh. Good riddance to VHS. I still have "fond" memories of sitting down to watch a movie only to have it interrupted half-way through for one of these reasons:

1. Tape's banjaxed and it's full of noise and other garbled junk due to bad recording, poor playback, or deterioration of the tape itself.

Or, my personal favourite:

2. Someone's half-recorded an episode of Matlock because they grabbed the first VHS tape in reach so they could watch it later. Or it's half of your Uncle Fester's 48th birthday cake reveal, shakily recorded with a home camcorder.

DVDs were the best thing to ever happen to the home movie entertainment in the late 90s.

Around 2000, I paid about $100 for a movie on VHS, in order to give it as a gift.

It was the timing that was key: pre-recorded tapes were priced to be sold to rental stores upon initial VHS release, then sold at a fraction of release price a month later.

I am from India and VCRs came into my life in the mid to late 80s. Initially, VCRs were so damn expensive (because they were all imported) and you would rent them for a weekend and a few films. The whole family, friends and neighbors would gather for a 'weekend binge watch' before binge watching even became a thing. It wasn't uncommon to rent 8 to 10 films and watch them back to back.

When I got to high school, we had domestic electronics companies manufacturing VCRs in India and we bought one at our home. A video rental store in our neighborhood had an excellent collection of English language films and a rental would cost Rs. 10 ($1 US ~ Rs. 13 to Rs. 16 those years). I would spend hours going through their collection and reading the synopsis on the jacket/sleeve before picking a couple of films to watch.

DVD/Blu-ray/Streaming today is better but the VCR/VHS nostalgia is a lot more than just the tech due to the lived experience of that era.

The thing you have to remember is that the movie industry HATED consumer VCRs and videotape. Industry insiders considered VCRs and tapes tools for copyright infringement and nothing more -- even after the Supreme Court ruled VCRs legal in Sony v. Universal in 1984. Jack Valenti went to his grave believing that the Supreme Court made the wrong decision. And my girlfriend's parents, who worked as an attorney and paralegal for the entertainment industry, banned VCRs from their home even into the late 80s.

To the movie industry, a movie was something you went to the theater and watched ONCE. If you wanted to see the movie again, you had to pay again. For consumers to buy a copy of a movie they could see again and again was, to studio heads, felony contempt of business model. But once market pressures forced their hands, the studio heads relented only somewhat. They would price the VHS tapes out of typical consumer reach, but allow them to be purchased by rental shops to be rented out to consumers, thus preserving the "pay for limited viewing" business model. Of course, once the first studio buckled to market pressures to release home copies for around $30 a pop, as described in the article, all bets were off.

Also note that VCRs were only ruled legal based on a very narrow exception: the Court felt that if there was a TV show that aired once, never to be aired again (Star Wars Holiday Special?), and you absolutely positively could not be in front of the TV to see it, you should be able to record it and then view the recording at a later time exactly once. This is the "time shifting" exception. Otherwise, VCRs are still mainly tools of copyright infringement in the eyes of the law. We seem to have this idea that if we copy something for personal use only, we're in the clear legally; Justice Blackmun, in his dissent in Sony, pointed out that this is not the case, and personal recordings of movies, music, etc. still infringe copyright and are violations of the law.

In the 1990s in the UK we got Star Trek episodes years behind America. Encounter at Farpoint for example came out in the US on 28 September 1987. In the UK it finally was broadcast on 26 September 1990.

It was available on VHS tape slightly earlier than that -- April 1990, but I was only 8 then.

By the time DS9 season 6 came out though, I was 15 and had a TV and VHS machine in my bedroom. I was also on the internet and was unwilling to wait until

A Time To Stand - first episode of Season 6 - came out in September 1997 in the US. In the UK it came out on VHS in Febuary 1998. From memory these were about £12-14 for a 2 episode tape. They were finally broadcast (with adverts) in October 1998 on premium subscription service Sky One.

I bought the first few in the season to complete the mini arc.

Come season 7 I bought the lot, once ever 2 weeks, 13 tapes, about £170, or about £320 in today's money - $420 for a season, $16 per episode, 35 cents per minute.

Random comment but one of my first memories of understanding price as a kid was going to a appliance store and seeing the newly released Ghostbusters VHS for 80 bucks. I thought about all the candy and video games I could buy for that.

>I think VHS tapes are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic for their video games than for movies, at least for now.

GenX'er here. I'm very nostalgic for 80s movies. There is no reason to buy a VHS version of it though, just like there's no reason to buy a cassette for 80s music. Vinyl only came back because of the unique sound properties, something that VHS or cassette doesn't have.

The first movie I owned on VHS was one of the Indiana Jones movies. It was either free or super cheap with the purchase of a meal at McDonald's in the 90s. Most of my VHS movie collection though was taped off the air or from cable broadcasts. When I cleared out my VHS stuff in the 00s, there was absolutely no market for it and I ended up dropping off a box of tapes at a dumpster at CalState Long Beach.

In the mid 80s I bought some 720KB 3.5" disks at the (what seemed) cheap price of £25 for five. At the time that would have been around $40.

I spent some money on a vhs recorder in the early nineties when I was a teenager. I mainly used it to record movies and then watch them later. I only owned a few tapes that I just reused endlessly. I kind of skipped dvds as a thing. I never bothered buying a separate player and I rarely used the one in my computer, when that was still a thing. I've not had a dvd or cd player for about five years now. My last computer that still had a slot for that died five years ago. Obsolete technology as far as I'm concerned long before that. It rarely got used.

Each purchase of a movie should have came with a license to exchange it for the same movie on new media as it became available. Like pirating a copy of a movie you already own shouldn't be illegal.

I distinctly recall seeing a VHS tape of 'The Goonies' retailing for £64 in a video shop in the north of England sometime around '86, which blew my tiny little mind, as that may as well have been a million pounds.

If memory serves, a video came out on video for hire 3 years after cinema release, then 2-3 years for video sale, then same again for network transmission. Or, perhaps those last two were the other way around? So long ago, goddamn.

First home movie I saw was Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. My neighbor had a VHS player in their basement den with a _wired remote_.

I did a lot of taping of movies that were broadcast locally. Lots of documentaries on PBS were many hours long and broadcast over the span of several days, or once a week over the span of several weeks. The only way to see them, for me, was to schedule recording for the entire series.

I had quite a collection of Woody Allen films on VHS only to watch then deteriorate before my eyes. It was sad to see them go.

All the paranoia about consumers copying movies is hilarious. It was not a thing. We owned two video stores and didn't even copy movies, with plenty of extra VCRs available. Most people didn't have extra VCRs to copy with and wouldn't even know how to do it if they did. Their paranoia propped up the video rental industry for over a decade until they figured out sell-though.

I don't really "collect" vhs tapes. I have a few that are weird or have never been released on any more modern format but I wouldn't pay more a few dollars for any tape.

At least once a week the vhs collector group I am in on facebook has posts from people asking how much a vhs movie is worth or offering to sell some common Disney "black diamond" movie for thousands of dollars.

Media was brutally expensive. Tapes, CDs, DVDs. I used to pay $20 for a single CD blank - it wasn't worth pirating a music CD that way.

I remember when my dad got our first video store membership. He was an engineer so it was early on. We had to join a membership club at the video store and the initial deposit to join was a a few hundred dollars to cover the costs if you absconded with tapes.

> They assumed every time someone rented a movie, they copied it.

That’s because they did! In my experience at least. I also remember when duplicating a tape at home with two VCRs stopped working, because they scrambled the signal somehow.

"for that price you can subscribe to streaming to watch whatever you want"

... not in today's fractured landscape, unless by "subscribe" you mean have a VPN and "whatever you want" means piracy over VPN.

My VHS story goes back to...1986?

We went to Fretter appliance. My dad shelled out $700 for the player and $80 for a copy of Purple Rain

My dad only made $12,000 a year back then so I'm not sure how smart of a purchase that was.

I am not interested in collecting VHS tapes because I wouldn’t count an a tape from the 1980s playing successfully (not being destroyed.). I had a lot of trouble with tapes getting pulled in the 1990s…

Have you watched a VHS lately? The quality is horrible!

These days you can go to your nearest Goodwill and load up on as many as you want for $1 apiece.

Don't really get what's meant to be surprising here. To me the heyday of VHS was clearly the 90's, not the 80's.

Anyone remember Famous Video in the Denver area?

dad took us kids to buy first VHS ever as present for mom; was in $90-$110 range