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Reference Desk
Are VCRs still made?
No. Funai Electric, the last manufacturer of VHS video cassette recorders, announced in July 2016 that it would stop production by the end of that month. No consumer VCR has been manufactured since.
They are also no longer sold new through US affiliate retail: across 2,360 unique listings pulled today on VCR search terms, zero were working consumer VCRs.
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When production ended
The end date is precise and well documented. In July 2016 Funai Electric — by then the last remaining manufacturer of VHS VCR and VCR/DVD combo recorders — announced it would cease production of VHS recorders by the end of that month. That is the terminal date for the format's manufacture, forty years after JVC introduced VHS in 1976.
Betamax hardware had stopped much earlier: the last Sony Betamax unit was produced in 2002. Sony continued selling Betamax tapes for another decade and a half after the machines were gone, which is the source of a lot of confusion about which of the two died when.
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Betamax introduced | November 1975 |
| VHS introduced | 1976 |
| VHS holds 60% of the North American market | 1980 |
| VHS holds 90% of the American VCR market | 1987 |
| Last Sony Betamax machine produced | 2002 |
| Funai ends VHS recorder production | July 2016 |
What US retailers actually list today
The stat worth citing, computed this morning. We pulled four VCR search terms — vcr, vhs player, vcr dvd combo and video cassette recorder — against US affiliate product feeds. That returned 2,360 unique listings across 71 advertisers, including Zoro, UnbeatableSale, Full Compass, Poshmark and Wayfair.
Working consumer VCRs found: zero. Four listings had titles that even resembled VCR hardware, and all four were something else:
| Listing | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| Panasonic LSVD0006 TV/VCR Combo Gear Kit | a bag of replacement gears |
| Retro Panasonic OmniVision VHS Player Stage Prop ×2 | a non-working prop, sold by a costume house, at $50 and $110 |
| The rest of the 2,360 | books about VCRs, VCR-branded merchandise, industrial parts with VCR in the part number, and films |
Method: four keyword queries against US affiliate product feeds on 6 September 2026, deduplicated by listing URL, every candidate title read one at a time. The same two non-machines came back — the Panasonic gear kit and the pair of stage props — alongside a VHS head cleaner, and nothing else in 2,360 listings resembles a working deck. This measures affiliate retail specifically; it does not cover auction sites or classifieds.
The secondhand route, honestly
Every VCR you can buy is a used machine, and that changes what you are actually shopping for. The parts that fail are mechanical and consumable: the belts perish, the idler tyre glazes, the head drum wears. A machine advertised as working means it worked on the day it was tested, which is not the same as a machine that has been serviced.
Editorial judgment: buy from someone who mentions belts or a head clean, and pay the premium for it. An untested $30 machine and a serviced $120 machine are not the same purchase, and the cheap one is usually the expensive one.
Why nobody restarted it
Vinyl came back and cassettes came back, so the obvious question is why VHS did not. The answer is not sentiment, it is mechanism. A record player is a motor, an arm and a stylus. A VCR is a helical-scan transport with a rotating head drum, threading arms and a dozen precision plastic parts, all of which need tooling that no longer exists. The manufacturing cost of a new VCR would land far above what anyone would pay to watch a 240-line picture.
The practical route for anyone with a shelf of home tapes is not a new VCR. It is a serviced old one, used once, to digitise everything — then the machine can go back out into the world for the next person.
Last verified 6 September 2026 against 2,360 unique US listings returned by four VCR search terms in the CJ product feed, every candidate read one at a time, plus Wikipedia's sourced production-end dates. Peer-to-peer asks of $500 or more are dropped as seller placeholders, as are repdigit asks such as $99 and $999. These are asking prices on this date, not sold prices.
VCRs in 2026, asked plainly
Are VCRs still made?
No. Funai Electric, the last manufacturer, announced in July 2016 that it would end VHS recorder production by the end of that month.
Can I still buy a VCR new?
Not through US affiliate retail. Across 2,360 unique listings pulled on 6 September 2026 on four VCR search terms, zero were working consumer VCRs; the closest matches were a replacement gear kit and two stage props.
When did Betamax machines stop being made?
The last Sony Betamax unit was produced in 2002, fourteen years before VHS recorder production ended.
Why has nobody reissued the VCR the way turntables were reissued?
A VCR is a helical-scan transport with a rotating head drum and precision plastic threading parts. The tooling no longer exists and the build cost would exceed what anyone would pay for a 240-line picture.
What should I look for in a used VCR?
A seller who mentions replaced belts, a cleaned head or any servicing at all. Belts, idler tyres and head drums are the consumable parts, and an untested machine is a gamble.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Videocassette recorder for the July 2016 Funai production announcement, and Wikipedia: Videotape format war for the 2002 Betamax end date and market-share figures. Both read 1 September 2026.
- CJ Affiliate product feeds, US advertisers, queried 6 September 2026 — the zero-VCR count is computed from that pull.
- Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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