h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is dvd really going to take off when other formats are on their way, such as digital VHS which is better quality, since there is no compression?

The quality is currently limited by the analog link between the player and the TV (essentially it is limited to broadcast quality). Some TVs have RGB inputs which allow higher quality and some have digital inputs. Although with a CRT TV an analog signal is required for the tube, in newer devices such as plasma screens and LCD screens, an optimum input signal would be digital. Unfortunately the DVD manufacturers are under huge pressure from the paranoid movie industry to omit digital outputs from their devices (for copyright reasons) so it may be sometime before the true beauty of DVD is realises onscreen. As for DVHS, the only improvements on conventional VHS is the picture quality and length of recording. All the features such as interactivity and random scene access are not availible (at least, they'd suffer from the same problem as the ancient cassette drives such as found on C64, of huge load times for the interactive features). Also, Digital VHS is compressed (otherwise there would be no improvement in total recording time) so the 'poorer quality' (which is soo much better than VHS anyway) is also present with DVHS.