Upstairs in the back room i have an old VCR that i haven't used since 2005. I found an old box of tapes this afternoon so i thought watch them to see what's on them.

I put the first one and it plays fine, no problem. I fast forwarded the tape to see what else was on it but nothing else was on it apart from that one programme. I take the tape out after fast forwarding and there's tape dangling out the VHS. I try to put another few in but the VCR just spits them out. The flap won't go down either and the tape looks tilted.

Has a tape head gone wrong somewhere?

Unlikely to be the heads, most likely either the take up spool isn't going round, or it's not winding the tape back in the cassette when you eject (both are common mechanical problems with VCR's).

Assuming it has various rubber drive parts (belts and pulleys) it's quite possible the rubber has deteriorated through non-use. Rubber seems to 'dissolve' if not used.

More likely part of the mechanism has jammed up. Sounds like it didn't properly retract the tape back into the cassette and there may be some part in the wrong position preventing the cassettes going in properly.

Might be possible to take it apart and clean it up. Whether it's worth it or not is another matter.

After rescuing my dad's old VCR and putting a few tapes on, I'm staggered that anybody ever thought the quality was even remotely watchable.

But 'Back then' It was. I was just glad to be able to time shift TV back then.

Also remember that if Bob Monkhouse had not had video recorders at his home the BBC and ITV would have lost some very good shows.

Such a shame new TV shows are not as good today.

If you're watching VCR on an LCD they look particularly bad, on CRT sets they were really pretty good, although VHS was probably the poorest quality of all VCR's (V2000 was the best, it was hard to tell if it was recorded or live).

Those of us who have been around a while think the same about Freeview on the average LCD/LED TV.

Really?

Sounds like something is wrong somewhere as VHS has never given me any cause for concern quality-wise (and I am a very picky person where picture quality is concerned). I find Freeview much worse.

Whilst I agree about much Freeview SD quality I don't see how you can think VHS was okay. For it's time it was fine and video recording was a revolution but good quality it was not, especially pre-recorded.

The small screens of the day did help to hide a lot of the imperfections of VHS whereas the large screens of today highlight problems with Freeview.

Obviously not as picky as you thought!

It's not the screen size, it's the much more rigourous signal processing that an analogue signal has to go through on a flat panel set rather than a CRT one.

It's not the fact it's analogue but the noisy low res picture that is then upscaled, after all the RGB from SCART is analogue but that is just about indistinguishable from digital - okay from a VCR it's composite which certainly doesn't help. Feed the panel a high quality analogue signal and it's fine.

The size makes a huge difference, watch VHS on a 36" CRT close up and it looks awful, watch it on a 21" panel from a "typical" distance and it's not so bad.

I was referring to the fuzziness of VHS due to its analogue nature, even when correctly tracked. No such fuzziness on a purely digital source. It's that that's the real bugbear, in my experience.

It wasn't 'fuzzy' due to it's analogue nature, it was 'fuzzy' due to it's VERY limited bandwidth

The original video tape sources were analogue, and they weren't fuzzy.

Nothing wrong with analogue, just as good as digital (and better in some respects).

Which is what I meant

It seemed to me that virtually nobody cared about the quality in those days.

Though I moved from VHS to S-VHS for timeshifting which was quite an improvement at the time.

330×480 (250 -lines): Umatic, Betamax, VHS, Video8, CED

400×480 (300 -lines): Super Betamax, Betacam (professional)

440×480 (330 -lines): analog broadcast, BetacamSP

560×480 (420 -lines): LaserDisc, S-VHS, Hi8

I think VHS remained dominant because of the wide range of pre-recorded tapes.