Thursday, September 21, 2006

Imagine

As a video storage medium, DVDs are well and good, but they're not without problems. Imagine a video storage medium with the following improvements.
  • You control the playback at all times, no more sitting through commercials because skipping them is "prohibited at this time"
  • The medium is encased in a protective shell to prevent smudging, scratches, and dust accumulation
  • The medium itself remembers where you last stopped watching and restarts at the same point. It even provides a visual indicator of where you left off
  • The video is uncompressed -- no more compression artifacts or "banding" of subtle color gradations
  • The medium can store three full hours of video, WITHOUT the noticable pause that DVDs have when switching layers
  • Error recovery: if the medium is damaged, the video keeps playing and recovers gracefully -- it doesn't jump back to the beginning!
  • Fully analog sound reproduction -- no more digitally sampled audio
  • No sluggish, poorly designed, inconsistent, buggy menus to suffer through
  • The same technology used by professional television studios and camaramen
  • 400 times more physical surface area for storage than DVD
  • No region codes that keep you from playing videos from other countries
You guessed it. VHS
VHS cassette
Top view of VHS cassette with U.S. 25c coin for scale

No comments:

Post a Comment