Sony VHS tapes - Curious as to their worth
 

I have spent quite a bit of time reading through this forum, and I noticed that Sony tapes have not been advised to use, even lordsmurf wrote this in a post a while back and I trust his opinion.

I do find however I like these tapes and have quite an extensive set of a particular sony tape.

I have a good chunk (say 20%) of my family recordings on Sony tapes, these ones to be exact (ignore the rip-off amazon price there :) ) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-High-R...42568189&psc=1

I also used some recently.

My ones, going on 15-years old some of them gave me no issues thus far. They always stated they had an anti-fungal treatment in the descriptions on the sleeve. This is interesting because when loads of my grandad's tapes that I did not take to store earlier on succumbed to mold and were a pain to transfer. But the 'sony high resolution V' tapes in the box with the moldy ones were the only ones that showed no visible signs of mold, while the others were in quite advanced stages of mold.

I treated them and the shells with UV light anyhow as they were stored around bad tapes, but they seemed fine and played fine with no issues and no cleaning was required. None of the Sony VHS tapes I had suffered from any issues (I have around 15 of my own, and 5 of my grandad's) (though I couldn't say the same for their Hi8 ME tape). They may have a slightly lower image quality than TDK tapes as a whole, but they are quite easy and cheap to obtain in the UK even at present (though not from amazon!), recent old stock but still good. I also have some Sony audio tape from the 1970s (family voice cassettes) that seem good.

This fits along with my perfect TDK (HS and EHG) and JVC SX/EHG/XG experience, which makes up the rest of my collection apart from a small quantity of Fuji tape from the 1990s that are still good, and a couple of Fuji tapes I have used in the present. The Fuji tape also seemed fine, but the Fuji tape I have used often shows a speckle like grain even when new (the S-VHS stuff in particular), but otherwise seemed fine and does not distract too much from the image.

Is there any reason as to why it may not be the best idea to use these? I have a stock of them that I am going through. I do keep all analog content i create today backed up digitally anyhow, the VHS are more physical keepsakes that we play on our decks when we wish to view them, with a digital and original VHS-C copy to go back to if needed.