Well, I had both a Pioneer LaserDisc player and a Philips Video 2000 Video-Compact-Cassette recorder, the first used to play back rented LDs and the other to record TV programmes and, later on, after the purchase of a "video stabilizer", that would filter out the MacroVision copy-protection signal on the LDs, to record the content of the rented out LDs.



It was always a trade-off between playing-time and picture quality and I chose to go for the extremes, with LD offering 2 times 60, later on 2 times 90 mintes per medium and the best picture quality, BetaMax offering 195 minutes, VHS up to 300 minutes and Video 2000 2 times 240 minutes in SP and 2 times 480 minutes in LP mode and the poorest picture quality.



This of course was largely mitigated when Philips and Grundig introduced their improved Super Video 2000 recorders in 1989, that could capture the full picture quality of the original LDs, to which Pioneer responded by launching HQ-LDs in 1990, offering up to 1152 lines of resoöution for PAL-HD-TVs, which, by the mid 1990s became the global HD standard.



I can hardly imagine the hassle it would have been for video rentals to wind back returned VHS tapes, because unlike BetaMax and Video 2000, VHS machines did, for a long time, not offer autorewind. I can still remember how angry our video rental guys could get when you returned a Video 2000 cassette rewound on the wrong side, especially if it happened repeatedly. They even started charging a rewinding fee.



The easier handling and the smaller storage space needed were, next to the superior picture quality, the main reasons why video rentals preferred the LD format and started phasing out Video Compact Cassettes by the late 1980s. BTW Gatrett_Cartoonist, even if you hadn't stated your location, it would have been obvious that you are from America since you didn't even mention VCC / Video 2000, which held the lion share in the video cassette market in Europe throughout most of the 1980's while hardly present in the American market at all.