EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a Viper classic. It originally appeared in the Star Beacon in December 1996 and is being repeated for nostalgia.

If you went shopping this holiday season for a new VCR to watch all of the films the Viper recommends over the year, you were probably struck by one thing _ the price sure has gone down.

Today, you can get a four-head VCR with high-fidelity stereo for as little as $200. Sometimes less.

At one time, such a machine would cost $800 or more.

That's why VHS has remained the king of the home video market for years. Everybody has VHS, the price is cheap, it does the job.

VHS at various times has been challenged by Beta, Laserdisc, 8mm and its own hybrid product, Super VHS. None have been up to the challenge. Yes, 8mm was successful in the camcorder market, but failed to get people interested in pre-recorded movies, even though quality is as good as VHS but with the fraction of the storage space.

A new contender will be making a name for itself in the coming year. Not only will it take on VHS, but the compact disc and more.

It's called the digital video disc, or DVD. It's about five inches long and looks a lot like a CD. The difference is, it stores much more information. It has the potential of delivering movies at 500 lines of resolution. That compares to 300 lines for VHS, 400 lines for Super VHS and Hi-8 and 425 lines for the larger laserdisc systems.

The first players were expected out for Christmas, augmented by about 50 movie titles available at around $25 each. Of course, that is a tiny fraction of what's available in VHS or Laserdisc. Players will cost about $500.

By the middle of the year, there will be DVD-rom units for computers, offering a minimum of seven times the storage capacity of CD-rom drives.

Another unique feature of the DVD is different information can be obtained on different levels of the disc. That means longer movies can fit on one disc. The signal transfer from one layer to the next is seamless.

Multi-levels of reading information means the same movie may contain an R-rated version of a film for adults, with a PG version for kids. The same disc may contain a letterboxed version for film aficionados, and pan-and-scan for those who want their screens filled to the top, even if it cuts off the sides.

While all of that sounds dazzling, imagine recordable discs. A DVD-rom writeable system would let you store four to eight times what your bigger computer hard drives today contain. Take the disc out and put it in a safe place and put in another!

Tech people are working on a way to encode movies so they can't be copied. Since this is all digital, you could purchase a blank DVD disc and make an exact copy of a DVD movie, just like you can copy a computer disc program.

Copy today's VHS movies onto another VHS tape and you will notice degradation of picture and _ if both aren't hi-f _ sound as well.