Comment by runarberg

This is an overly reductive argument. Resolution is only a relatively small part of the quality. Generally people value sound quality much higher, which DVD brought to CD level, and Blu-Ray has exactly the same sound quality (nobody has speakers for the 7.1 surround sound). VHS also had interlacing, and older VHS also had plenty of the tape artifacts polluting the image, DVDs had none of those.

At the end of the VHS era (when DVDs had already been available for years) maybe you had a good enough (picture) quality on the first few plays of the tape (which you still had to rewind etc.), but at the same time you could go to your local video rental get a 5 year old DVD that had been played hundreds of times, had the same (or slightly better) picture quality, much better sound quality, no need to rewind, and tons of extra features.