Last week saw the annual Smart Show at the NEC in Birmingham, one of the key events in the consumer electronics journalist's calendar.

Here, the nation's gadget hacks jostle with the country's dealers and manufacturers to discover what are likely to be the must-have electronic items later in the year.

However, one suspects that, for most of the dealers attending the show, the most pressing issue was deciding how to fill the shelf space in their stores that was once occupied by VHS video recorders.

Sales of video tape recorders are plummeting, and dealers are keen to know exactly what the consumer will buy to record their programmes on. Sadly, they probably left the Smart Show even more confused about that than they were when they arrived.

The truth is that there are now so many potential replacements for the VCR that no one in the consumer electronics industry is quite sure which one to back. The two leading contenders are recordable DVD and hard disc based recording systems. Both have been on sale for well over a year, and both are showing a gradual upward swing in sales.

Yet neither solution is entirely satisfactory and, to make matters even more confusing, both systems are available in a number of different guises and formats.

The fundamental problem with DVD recorders is that, unless the user opts for a pricey double-sided disc, they can only archive around two hours' worth of quality video on one DVD: small beer when compared with the long recording times offered by VHS.

Consumers are also confused by the fact that there are three competing DVD disc formats (Philips' DVD+RW, Pioneer's DVD-RW and DVD-RAM, backed by Panasonic, JVC, Hitachi and several other companies). The rewritable discs for each format are not universally compatible with DVD players and DVD-ROM drives in PCs. However, there are now write-once discs on sale that will play back in most DVD drives/players.

Forgetting about optical disc-based storage systems and opting for PC-like hard discs would, then, seem like a good alternative. Yet hard disc recorders also have only a limited amount of storage space (so far, the average is 40 gigabytes, or around 40 hours of quality video). That means keeping a programme permanently is not really an option.

Confusingly, hard disc video recorders are available in a number of forms, from standalone products (such as the original TiVo) to units with integrated TV decoders, as touted by Pace and Humax.

In what seems like a very clever move, Toshiba used the Smart Show to debut the RD-XS30, which offers the best of both worlds, combining a DVD-RAM recorder with a sizeable 60 gigabyte hard disk. Toshiba believes that users will record programmes such as soap operas and football matches on the hard disk, and archive anything they want to keep permanently by transferring it to DVD.

However, at £700, a fairly competitive price given the complexity of the product, the RD-XS30 is still way out of the price league of consumers who simply want to replace their VCR with something digital.

To complicate matters further, several companies are hoping that the solution might be to integrate hard disc recorders within TVs or screens (Philips is to debut a high-end widescreen TV with integrated hard disc recorder later this year).

Building a hard disc within a TV certainly makes sense, because it could be used to store all sorts of other things including image and music files and advanced programming software. From a punter's perspective, it is one box less under the TV set too.

If TVs with integrated hard discs become the norm, there is still a strong case for using a DVD recorder for archiving. But which type? Far away from Birmingham, in Tokyo, Sony chose Monday to parade its latest DVD recorder. The model uses a new kind of optical disc, dubbed a Blu-ray. Designed to be used for the archiving of high-definition TV transmissions, Blu-ray discs have a storage capacity of 27 gigabytes: enough for 16 hours of DVD -quality video. With that kind of storage, would someone need a hard disk recorder anyway?

While Sony stresses that it does not yet have any plans to bring Blu-ray to the UK, some industry insiders are predicting that the company is bluffing, and that a recorder could be on sale by Christmas.

So, there are four different DVD recording formats, hard disc recorders in digital decoders, in combinations with DVD recorders and shoehorned into TVs. Oh, and did I mention that one of the key features of Microsoft's living room-friendly PC (Media Center) is its video recording software and sizeable hard disk?

It's no wonder dealers are a little confused about what to stock and, if they are confused, what about the customers? As one dealer told me: "Bring back VHS and Betamax. At least you knew where you were with just two competing formats."