SONY'S Blu-ray Disc may have won the recent battle against Toshiba's HD DVD, but law student Clarisse Fong, 21, doesn't really care.

She's got four seasons of Gilmore Girls on old-school VHS (Video Home System) tapes and she's more concerned about her VHS player breaking down.

And justifiably so. With the world of video-recording moving towards more high-tech formats such as Blu-ray, VHS seems like a dinosaur. Most electronics stores have almost stopped stocking products that use the format.

A check with four electronic megastores in Singapore last week showed that none of them sells VHS players any longer.

With low-end DVD players available at $69, the closest thing to VHS on the shelves is a hybrid of the DVD recorder and VCR player. But that too, thanks to poor demand from customers, could be on its way out.

Best Denki merchandising director C.J. Raj, 52, says: 'Once the stock clears, we have little intention to bring in more units. It really is a sunset product.'

Another tell-tale sign of the VHS format's decline is the dwindling number of videotapes available or in demand today as newer formats overtake them.

In January, film buffs mourned the closing of legendary VHS rental store D&O at Tanglin Mall after 24 years in business, while other stores that deal with VHS tapes manage to survive only by stacking VCDs and DVDs alongside the tapes.

Shop manager Lynn Leow, 32, reveals VHS rentals at Chuan Hwee Videostore in Bishan have slowed steadily and dropped about 40 per cent in the last decade.

And with VHS orders from video stores halving over three years, Scorpio East, one of the leading video programme distributors in Singapore, stopped releasing videotapes after April 2006.

Despite all signs pointing towards the inevitable death of VHS, some die-hard fans aren't giving up the fight.

Ms Fong says it is just a matter of pressing a few buttons on her player every Sunday when Gilmore Girls airs. She argues: 'Why get the DVDs when I can tape it for so much less? No one should be that lazy.'

Others blame inertia. Student Ian Chung, 20, still uses his VHS player to record episodes of American serials such as House and CSI. 'You grow up watching Disney on VHS tapes. It's something you get very used to,' he says.

Some VHS users in their 30s cite slightly a different reason - a remembrance of things past.

Film programmer Zhang Wen Jie, 33, who has over 80 tapes at home, remembers his school days when there was no Amazon.com, cable TV or video-sharing sites such as Youtube. He had to tape shows such as Rebel Without A Cause and British music chart TV programme Top Of The Pops.

Like the other VHS fans out there, he might find it hard to get a replacement player when his current one stops working. But there is hope for these diehards.

There are some outlets listed in the Classifieds, such as Nautical Electronics, that still repair VHS players, for an average bill of $30 to $40.

A spokesman for GS Tong Electronics says customers drop by daily, but some players can't be repaired as the spare parts are not manufactured anymore.

Yes, the future sounds bleak for VHS. But if its continued use by younger Singaporeans such as Ms Fong and Mr Chung is anything to go by, it may be too early to place an obituary for it.

Ms Fong says: 'There's no way VHS is going down dying. Not yet, anyway.'