I don’t think they know what they are getting into with this.
First of all the VHS collecting community (the legitimate one, not the online gambling speculator/latest craze) hates this. Hard. The other grading companies have gotten nothing but negativity from the community.
Second, sealed VHS is a joke. Outside of a few companies none of the manufacturers had labeled shrink wrap, it was, for the most part, primitive shrink wrap, the kind you can replicate on just about any of todays shrink wrap machines. This is on top of the fact that there were tons of tapes that never came shrink wrapped at all. Finally, tape rot (which will come up again in a moment) you’d have to open the tapes to ensure they aren’t full of white crusty mold, which does happen quite often in sealed tapes and can ruin your player and potentially make you sick.
Third: ex rentals. The VAST majority of valuable VHS tapes are ex rentals, this means cut boxes, rental stickers, security devices, price stickers, genre labels, etc. how do you even begin to account for this? Current collectors kind of account for this, however when grading tapes it would be akin to comic collectors being cool with random store stamps, names being written on the comics, pages removed, but there, staples being removed, and so on.
finally the dreaded tape rot/spool swap/case swap- this is a doozy:
example: I have a copy of a movie, it’s got horrible tape rot but a beautiful sleeve, I can, with minimal effort, use a garbage old vcr, clean some of the gunk off of it, dub it to a brand new tape, open the original case and swap the spools.
Example 2: I have a destroyed tape but the top label is fine. With, once again, minimal effort, I can remove that label and the spools and put them in a new case. Since some of these movie were produced on multiple different tapes, some commercially available, you’d never know the difference.
how would you grade that?
