VHS 📼 tapes to sell

[401mrsb]

I have dozens of VHS 📼 tapes to sell in original cases (plastic clam shell and cardboard) but 😱they smell musty since they were stored boxes in the basement…any suggestions?

[klhmdg]

Dont sell them.

[pinkryder123]

You could try to let them air out or let them know in the listing description. You also should check for mold or mildew on the tapes. If they're not worth much individually, you can try listing in a lot. Or donate them to the thrift store. 🙂

[chapeau-noir]

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@401mrsb wrote:

I have dozens of VHS 📼 tapes to sell in original cases (plastic clam shell and cardboard) but 😱they smell musty since they were stored boxes in the basement…any suggestions?

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I've sold a lot of VHS tapes.  This what I know: The only ones which sell for me are rare genre movies that have not been transferred to DVD. 

You need to run through all of them - if you don't have a VHS player to do this, you're basically selling an unknown product as tape is not a particularly stable medium long-term and can deteriorate if not stored properly. 

I would go through them, extract any rarities that you can, and just donate the rest.  There are people who still buy VHS and have VHS players - I know, because I can still sell VHS players (when I find them).

Don't spend too much time over this as there are few titles in VHS that are still sellers.

[femmefan1946]

We are in the stamp business so there would be differences, but we have had a "musty" collection walk into the shop and be escorted right back out to the mall, and any appraisal or offer made there.

DH would not allow the stock to be damaged by any hint of mildew.

Mildew is almost impossible to remove without destroying paper.

What effect it has on VHS tapes I do not know, but it isn't something  collector would like to introduce into his home.

In passing: The FLORIDA CLOSET

Some philatelists in muggy warm climates will set up storage for their collections in a closet fitted with a single light bulb and a sealed door. The light bulb would be incandescent and 25W-- not LED. The small amount of heat from the incandescent light, which is left on at all times, is enough to lower humidity and discourage foxing and mildew.

[toysaver]

If they smell musty they may have water damage.  Research the titles to see if any are super rare.  Then see if they play.  Then you can attempt to eliminate the odor.  Place in a plastic bin with kitty litter and baking soda for a few weeks.  

[m60driver]

A combination of Febreze and a Lysol spray can work wonders on some items that smell.  But as others have noted, most VHS tapes are not worth the time to list.

[arisdisc · Accepted solution]

I once had about 1000 of them. Put them up well over 10 years ago and sold about half - again, as mentioned in this thread, only titles that have never been re-released were the ones who sold.

Today, there are even fewer.

Yeah, gotta agree - their pretty worthless these days. Probably not worth the trouble.

If you're still committed to trying, remove the outer paper sleeves and let them sit in the sunshine for a day.
If that doesn't help - donate them somewhere. I doubt the plastic cases are damaged. I still have a handful and the tapes themselves play well, so I disagree with comments about the tape themselves deteriorating.

[atlasesattic]

I would put them in a closed box for a week with alot of dryer sheets stuffed in there

[a_c_green]

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@arisdisc wrote:

If you're still committed to trying, remove the outer paper sleeves and let them sit in the sunshine for a day.
If that doesn't help - donate them somewhere. I doubt the plastic cases are damaged. I still have a handful and the tapes themselves play well, so I disagree with comments about the tape themselves deteriorating.

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Ayup. I suspect the musty smell comes from the outer sleeves only, and airing those out will probably dissipate that well enough.

@401mrsb: The bigger problem is finding someone interested in buying them for a price that will give you any kind of profit at all, and that's after you have played them to be sure they still have a useful signal recorded. Commercial recordings (ex-rentals, etc.) are recorded with fully-saturated signals for the best playback; don't waste your time on bootlegs or home recordings with improvised, handwritten labels.

Titles that are available on DVD or Blu-ray are not likely to sell on VHS anymore, with the possibly singular exception of that guy who's determined to buy up every VHS copy of "Jerry Maguire" he can lay his hands on. So, there's that. 😁 (https://www.jerrymaguirepyramid.com/) There are also a few Special Edition releases that might still hold a few bucks of value, such as a 2-tape set of "Titanic" that came with a book and a piece of film purporting to be a frame of the movie print.

One other thing: when testing these videos, be prepared to clean your VCR playback heads a lot. One old cassette with a bad case of shedding oxide will ruin the playback of every tape following, giving the impression that some later movie is bad when in fact it was the preceding tape that messed it up. Be ready with Q-tips or cotton swabs and acetone (e.g. nail polish remover) to give the playback heads a quick wipe-down whenever the need arises.

Beyond all that... your time has value, so you might want to test the waters with a few titles before jumping into it full-time and having no sales to show for it later. Good luck.

[chapeau-noir]

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@arisdisc wrote:

I once had about 1000 of them. Put them up well over 10 years ago and sold about half - again, as mentioned in this thread, only titles that have never been re-released were the ones who sold.

Today, there are even fewer.

Yeah, gotta agree - their pretty worthless these days. Probably not worth the trouble.

If you're still committed to trying, remove the outer paper sleeves and let them sit in the sunshine for a day.
If that doesn't help - donate them somewhere. I doubt the plastic cases are damaged. I still have a handful and the tapes themselves play well, so I disagree with comments about the tape themselves deteriorating.

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Trust me on this - I've worked with many, many old tapes - VHS and cassettes.  If they're stored properly, they have a decent life span, yet there is always a chance of damage due to remanence decay (magnetic loss), blotting out whole areas of footage.  Proper storage in a cool, dry place will minimise this, but if they smell musty, that is not optimal condition, so I wouldn't bet on anything.  Sitting them out in the sun certainly won't do anything that's not just cosmetic, though, yes, it would be helpful not to have musty smelly slip covers, but I wouldn't move on offering them for sale without being able to watch them due to inability to see if there is actual damage.

ETA:  Unless one just wants to offer them 'as is'. 

[2013grotz]

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@femmefan1946 wrote:

Mildew is almost impossible to remove without destroying paper.

What effect it has on VHS tapes I do not know, but it isn't something  collector would like to introduce into his home.

Indeed.  I stumble over VHS stock everywhere I go but I pass on it.  Too many problems exist.  Besides determining if the media is still good by playing it and watching it eagle-eyed, which is an issue in itself.  But  tapes stored in moist environments will have mold/mildew on the tape.  It eats into the tape, dirties it, and ultimately gets spread all about from the player to the other discs, so mold/mildew smell is always a question and something you don't want to fool around with.  Like you say, it's nothing that you'd want to readily introduce into the rest of your collection and it can be exceedingly time-consuming to take care of it all should one want to.

CDs, DVDs and Blurays are a lot easier to use, so VHS has gone by the wayside.  But for people like me trying to resell, validating them are so much easier too.  While disc rot is an issue with these too for being stored in humid environments, detecting it and any other problems are so much easier between visual inspection of the disc surface and computer programs that will give you readability scans of the disc.

[chapeau-noir]

Yes - generally discs have a lifespan of up to 100 years, too.  VHS (and cassettes) - not so much - up to 20-25% deterioration on average unless stored in optimal conditions for those older 80s, etc. tapes.  Back in the day it was easy to have the heads gummed up on a player from playing some nasty VHS and have to clean everything up.  I was glad to be finally done with messing with it.

[fm2000]

Go through your tapes, pick out the rare/weird/specialty/instructional/still sealed and horror (the most sought after VHS genre) and look up what they sell for. The common/mainstream stuff (Disney animated movies. Top Gun, Titanic and whatnot) are worthless and not worth bothering with even in great condition. If they are worth selling, inspect the tape for mold in the windows and flip the lid and look for damaged tape (chewed when it was ejected from the last machine it was in), rewind if needed and look for damaged tape again.

If they are valuable but have mold (use a magnifying glass and look in the clear windows at the reels), you probably have to chuck them (unless you have something worth high hundreds or thousands, which is unlikely.) A lab can salvage many damaged tapes, but it is obviously expensive. If you have something rally valuable, the tape is ruined but the original sleeve is ok, the sleeve can still be worth something.

Some laugh at the idea of selling VHS, but like vinyl records, some VHS are worth big money. But, like vinyl records, most VHS are garbage you can't give away, but it is absolutely worth taking a second to check what something sells for if it seems like it might be something desirable.

[401mrsb]

Thank you all for taking the time to make suggestions. I very much appreciate your consideration and guidance as well as having a place to query experienced sellers. May you live long and prosper😊