CONSUMER NOTES A RENTER’S ROUNDUP OF VIDEO VALUES

As one store manager puts it, video cassettes and video cassette recorders (VCRs) are becoming a way of life, because they offer the consumer the freedom to choose how he or she will be entertained. So if you own or rent a VCR or are considering buying one, it might be a good idea to think about the type of video cassette rental store that you want to do business with. We learned from our survey that the kinds of products and services they offer and the prices you pay for renting cassettes can vary quite a bit.

For example, only half of the stores we contacted rent Beta cassettes, which fit Sony’s Betamax and other Beta format VCRs. All of the stores rent Video Home System (VHS) cassettes, which fit Matsushita’s original VHS and other VHS models. Most of the stores also offer weekend discounts, and nearly all of them offer special services to customers who decide to join the store’s video rental club. Some stores only rent to club members.

Gary Coleman, manager of Preston TV & Video, says that one new item on the video market is the hi-fi cassette, which offers a substantially i higher quality of sound. The only catch is that you have to have a hi-fi VCR to play it on. The other item is a new video camera that records sound and video simultaneously. Now, amateur moviemakers can take the camera anywhere to film an event and then come home and pop the cassette into their VCR.

The important message: Do some comparative shopping before you rent. Compare the prices and services of video cassette rental stores in your area to the ones we randomly called for our survey.