In the early days of VCR's people couldn't afford to buy tapes, they were so expensive - most people only had two or three.

It was £1 per hour of blank tape for a good few years I remember.

E180 - £3
E240 - £4

That sounds about right. I think we had three, one came with the machine and I bought two.
You had to set the time and you were bolloxed if the network changed it.
I can't remember the make of the machine, but it was a "top loader."

My sister had the "third format." the ill-fated Philips machine, that lasted much less than Betamax.

We also has a video disc player at one time, I got free for something or other, that didn't last long either, as the discs were expensive and the choice of films, poor.

Did it get everybody Dancing in the Moonlight?

I ran a video recording business in the late 1980's so always bought good branded High-Grade tapes from the like of TDK, Sony & Maxell. Never had a problem with them. Then in the late 1990's moved to SVHS and have a lot of Sony (I think) tapes that were also fine. Haven't used VHS to record onto since about 2004 but have hundreds and hundreds of tapes to transfer to digital formats over the next 50 years! Those I've transferred so far are of excellent quality (for the 270 line VHS system) in there is very little difference between the picture quality from something recorded off BBC1 in 1986 or watching most of the freeview/freesat low bitrate channels of today. The real advancement in technology was the introduction of DVD and the vast improvement in quality/resolution/colour reproduction over VHS tapes. Such a shame that we then moved backwards with the introduction of low bitrate/high GOP DTT/DSAT images and had to wait until the introduction of HDTV to see a decent quality picture once more!

Lifetime guarantee. I have quite a few tapes offering this but what was covered - general degradation of the recording quality or just breaking of the tape itself? A lifetime guarantee seems a very odd thing to offer on a media that suffers after a few passes...

Stretching the memory now.
I started out on scotch tapes. They worked but we're not perfect, some drop outs etc.

I used a few of the mid spec tdk tapes (EG or something like that) which did seem to provide a slightly better pic, but they were not so good if you kept reusing them. Also I def remember these were noisy in operation, tape travel squeaking etc.

In the later days of tape (btw all this is vhs based) I used loads of budget sony cd tapes, and these did a fair job tbh, but nothing exceptional.

I think our first VCR in the late seventies was a Ferguson Model 8922.
It came with a tape, but additional 3 hour tapes were £9.99. Some I bought from a Granada TV Rental shop as not many stores near me sold them.

At the time I thought the reproduction was very good, you couldn't tell if you were watching a live programme or a recording.

I still have a Sony SLV SE 740, it sits under a Panasonic DVD/CD player and Humax 2000T PVR.

I've a lot of film noir on video tape so do use the VCR on occasions.
I've an auto selector, so whichever remote I press that's what comes up on the TV, I can also push the audio through my vintage Hifi, if I choose.

In the early 90's I preferred Scotch and BASF tapes (I still have WWF Wrestling events recorded in 1991 and 92 on these,) but now I find Maxell tapes are better, I used to buy different brands to see which were the best, The Sky and BBC branded tapes were rubbish as they chewed up in one of my VCR's, I recently bought some Signalex branded tapes from Poundland and they ended up going in the bin as they were all defective

My local YMCA shop still accepts pre recorded VHS tapes, I didn't know anyone did that any more. It's a dead format, move on.

Update. I took my last VHS tapes in to them this morning and they took them as I had previously asked them if they would but said they were not taking any more.

Our YMCA and some of the more local charity shops still tale them. I picked up the Star Wars trilogy last week - watching them now. They were only 25 pence each! Its the first time I have ever watched them all through and in the correct order and I am really enjoying so far.

Don't buy Signalex blanks. They have mould growing on them and are horrible quality. I think they are old and poorly stored - maybe even erased pre-used tapes.

I remember that video tapes were in short supply in about 1982/3 and they were about £7 each. When word got around they were in the local store those at work who had a video recorder headed to town in their lunch break to buy some, otherwise the next day they had sold out.

Incidentally I had 150-200 tapes I took to the tip last week all ones I had recorded over the years, I tried to play some and the quality was dreadful.

I think if the OP asks around some of his friends might have old unwanted tapes that he could record over. People often got rid of their VHS machine but tapes lay forgotten in a cupboard. A friend of ours, who lives in a small flat, recently discovered a pile of LPs, they got rid of their turntable/music centre ages ago.

I don't know if is due to the jittery nature of the VHS signal but LCD TVs don't seem to reproduce them very well and of course todays large screens don't help either.

Just clever 3M marketing, they never specified what the lifetime was as far as I recall? what is the lifetime of a tape and what is covered? they never defined it so they could easily say a faulty tape had exceeded the expected lifetime if they had to. I believe 3M would replace tapes under warranty if you bothered to return them.

I'd say most tape failures were due to the machine chewing it up rather than the tape failing, of course eventually the material will wear out and Scotch tapes were terrible for shedding little bits of black dust...... but they had the best marketing out there so sold in the millions despite not being a very good tape, but good at wearing out video heads.