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owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

On September 26, 1996, Toshiba announced the first DVD player, the Toshiba SD-3000. It was released in Japan in November 1996 and initially cost ¥77,000, equivalent to about $770 US. It was the first consumer DVD player in the world, and of course, DVD became the successor to VHS. Ironically, the first DVD player was announced very close to 20 years after the first VHS VCR.

Problems with VHS

VHS had a good run, and in 1996 it still had about a decade left, but it was showing its age. It didn’t record at the full resolution of either NTSC or PAL video. Arguably in 1976 few people noticed because screens were comparatively small and the VCR connected over RF, causing signal degradation anyway. But by 1996, TV tubes were higher quality, most TVs had at least composite connections and many had higher-quality connections like S-Video or even component video.

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