If a VCR were manufactured now days...

[Litaiff]

If a VCR were manufactured today...

1. What would change in this technology?
2. What engineers would put better to the video quality for these old tapes?
3. What would you like to this to have?

[lingyi]

Using Video Cassette Recorder as the key term for the storage system. It would be digital and 8K.

Edit: It would have RF Decode, Time Base Correction and 4:4:4 digital output. All technologically possible today.

[dvd3500]

Solid state?

[dellsam34]

It's a complicated system to record video, that's why they are not manufactured today and they never will be. Flash memory and hard disc is the current standard now.

[Bwaak]

Tape has lost.

Until the 2000s tape was the most dense and economical storage - think gigabytes per tape vs tens and hundreds of megabytes per HDD. But in mid-2000s the table has turned when solid-state media became able to store gigabytes, and the price dropped below $20 per gig. 13 GB MiniDV vs a 4GB or 8GB or 16GB SD card? And the capacity kept growing. It is mind boggling how much data can be stored on a tiny MicroSD card.

If you are asking about VHS, then I would expect all VCRs made in 21st century to have built-in TBC and HDMI output, but VHS was already losing to DVD, so they did not bother with improvements aside of the top of the line models, and even these had crappy mechanics. Also, greedy manufacturers did not want to offer the best format, they just wanted to sell a good-enough format. They intentionally crippled D-VHS to prohibit lossless copies, and there were few D-VHS VCRs manufactured to start with.

When you can record a TV program onto a USB drive and you can rip a DVD losslessly, why would you need a VCR? It is a dead tech. It is not even the best for storage, I'd say M-discs are the best for longevity, but then you need to ensure you have a reader in a hundred years. So, we'll be copying digital data from one format to another... or we will lost everything in a fiery blast The less density, the better long term storage. Frame grabs carved on clay tablets have a chance to survive for millennia.

[dellsam34]

D-VHS decks did record full broadcast stream from over the air channels at up to 19Mbps for 1080i and AC3 audio, that was the maximum allowable bandwidth by the FCC for OTA channels. D-Theater commercial tapes though did provide 1080i at up to 25Mbps and Dolby digital or DTS at up to 6 ch. audio, These you cannot copy.