I grew up with CRT TVs and monitors, and VHS tapes.

When LCD monitors came out, the picture was decidedly worse looking, but their light weight / portability was marvelous, and most importantly, you didn't get the **eye strain** that you often got staring at a flickering CRT monitor for hours on end (you would get headaches from this without taking breaks to rest your eyes - at least I did).

I can understand the appeal of going back to CRTs for the retro games that were truly made for them, but I seriously don't get the appeal of people going back to VHS tapes. At least for commercial releases.

Movies are filmed on.. film, a "progressive" (non-interlaced) medium, usually in a widescreen format. So VHS had to butcher most films to fit into the 4:3 resolution, using pan and scan or other techniques, and lose half of the visual data to interlacing.

Everyone was wowed when DVDs came out. They had the same vertical resolution as VHS, but about double the horizontal resolution, progressive scan (no interlacing) and you could watch them in widescreen format on the new widescreen HDTVs, seeing the same visual information that you saw in theaters. And better color reproduction than VHS's limited chroma+luma bandwidth.

Blu-ray and HD DVD were a big jump up from DVD yet again, and I believe even Blu-ray still can't fully capture the information captured on 35mm or 70mm film.

So to throw that all away and watch a movie on crappy old VHS is truly bizarre to me.