[DanL]

Sure, you can bring your own vcr to record, but thats a lot of work for some teams. Some teams might have trouble bringing a VCR (i.e. if they're traveling a long way, would feel uncomfortable bringing a VCR, don't have enough people to constantly moniter it and see when you need a new tape, etc). For some teams thats just too much hassle, and unfortionatly, would prefer to go the American way and spend $20 or so to buy a recording. Now that I know about these VCR's, I'm going to try and bring one to nationals, but again, I might not be able to get a VCR with me to take down to Florida, so it would be pretty cool if we could buy recordings of the whole event.

Quality is another concern. Lets face it - VHS doesn't offer a lot of it. Personally, if I could get the equipment to get a video stream digitalized without going through VHS, I'd do it. Problem is, that probably costs a bit more and requires a bit more space than the average laptop has. However, if FIRST could spend a few hundred bucks getting such a piece of equipment that they could use several times a year, year after year, and selling the profits, I'd think they could make some money in the long run. I mean, look at the results so far. Out of 20 votes, not one has said they don't want a recording of the competitons.