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An analog signal written to a attractive tape will fade with time, with portions of the waveform eroding away. If you have ever viewed a VHS recording that has been copied frequently, with one copy being made from another, you have seen how the signal degrades with each copy times. A copy of a digital recording is as clear as the original, no matter how many generations of copies have been made, because the ones and zeroes of each replicate are identical. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition. This capacity to make an uncounted number of copies with no degradation is alone enough to justify a move from analog to digital recording methods. Yet, there are still more reasons to scrape by the move to digital.
Maintaining an archive of analog recordings means keeping shelf after shelf full of VHS cassettes (or whatever other recording mediocrity you use), all of which look alike. Paper labels attached to the cassettes can pinpoint the contents — as long as your tape librarian is critical in their methods — and no one removes or alters a label. A cull tape can hold as much as eight hours of video, and more often than not, only a few minutes of that strap are of evidentiary value. Every time that segment of the tape is viewed, the bind is eroded slightly — especially if the recording is stopped or viewed in square motion. Those viewing the tape will have to fast-forward and rewind the recording to get to the measure they want to see, and that wears the mechanism more. Finally, if someone exposes the cassette to a attractive field accidentally or intentionally, the entire recording can be bygone.
Source: Police News