New Delhi: Funai Electric Company, the last remaining Japanese manufacturer of VCR devices, which was sold under the names various brands including Sanyo in North America, has announced an end to its production this month.
For those who don’t remember, VCR is a tape player which plays VHS tapes, and this is what movies used to come in way before CDs were around. Many people thought that VCRs and VHS tapes were extinct by now. However, Funai Electric has been producing units all this while in China.
In fact, the company continued to sell VCRs under brands like Sanyo and estimates pegged its sales at 750,000 worldwide. Though actually little, it counts a lot for a format that many thought may have died. According to Funai, the difficulty in getting parts and declining sales were primary reasons that led to their decision to shut down.
VHS cassettes could record between 30 minutes and five hours of video footage. Over time, VCR recorders were even able to double their capacity, recording up to 10 hours of video on one cassette.
Funai produced its first VCR in 1983 and sold as many as 15 million a year at one point.
Sony, which was also a competitor in this field, announced at the end of 2015 that it would stop selling cassettes commercially this year. It also shut down sales of the Sony VCR devices back in 2002.
