Videotape

A video cassette consists of a plastic tray made ​​of polystyrene, acrylonitrile -butadiene - styrene and other plastics, in which there is a rolled magnetizable coated plastic tape ( magnetic tape or videotape ). The video cassette is used as media for movies.

There are different standards, data formats and cassette sizes for use in various devices for recording and playback of movies ( VCR ), for example: VHS and video 2000 video cassettes for analog video and audio signals and digital video cassettes as DV and miniDV for records by camcorder.

Due to the advent of downstream technologies at the beginning of the 21st century, such as recordable DVD, hard disk recorders, recordable BD -R the importance of the video cassette has been greatly reduced.

Tape formats

The videotape format describes the tape format by a video is stored on a video cassette. Videotape formats can be divided into analog and digital tape formats.

Life of videotapes

Video tapes have a limited life span as all the disks, which depends critically on the proper storage, but also on type of strap. In a dry place at normal room temperature constant up to 35 years is possible in rare cases. 20 years are almost always achieved. In the two aging effects must be distinguished:

• Foreign magnetization. geomagnetism through, magnetic influences on the storage location or the Durchmagnetisieren through on the coil underlying and overlying layers of the tape These effects lead to the " fading " of the recording and to a deterioration of image quality.
• The physical resolution of the magnetic coating of the tape after a certain time which leads to a smearing of the strip. Such a tape smeared in operation, the parts of the tape guide of the recorder and the video heads and is no longer playable. It can cause damage to the machine in each case to a need for cleaning of all tape guide members.