VHS

VHS is the format a generation watched everything on, so its faults read as home rather than as damage. A frame with tracking noise across it feels recorded off a television at night.

It also destroys evidence, which is why found footage horror lives on it. The tape cannot resolve a face at the back of a room, so the audience fills the gap.

The picture is recorded as a composite signal with the colour carried at far lower resolution than the brightness. That is why a red coat bleeds past its own edge.

The heads read the tape in diagonal stripes and switch over at the bottom of each field. The switch leaves a torn line a few pixels tall at the bottom of the frame.

Every copy loses more. Generation loss adds noise, softness and colour drift each time a tape is dubbed, and a third generation copy barely holds a shape.

Use it for the 1980s and 1990s, for found footage, for a security recording, and for anything that has to look watched rather than shot.

Skip it when the content has to be read. VHS eats text, small faces and any fine pattern.

A DV camcorder is the format that replaced it. DV is sharper, cleaner and digital, so it drops out in blocks rather than smearing.

The test is a straight edge. Smeared colour and a wobbling line is tape. Square blocks in a fast move is DV.

Home recordings, rental copies and camcorder tapes all ran on VHS from 1976 onward. Found footage horror adopted the format because a tape explains both why the picture is bad and why it survived.

The model returns a sharp modern frame with colour fringing. Ask for the tracking noise, the torn line at the bottom and the low resolution together.

The other failure is a widescreen shape. Say 4:3, because a tape era frame is never wide.