What are the advantages of digital tape? What is “Generation loss”?
(This answer is retained in the FAQ primarily for historical interest, because the old analogue formats, where generation loss was a problem, are completely obsolete.) There are two basic formats for recording: Analogue and Digital. VHS, Beta, SuperVHS, 8mm, Hi-8, etc are analogue formats. DV and MiniDV are digital. With analogue recording, the intensity of a signal is recorded on tape directly as a value. Simple. With digital recording, the intensity of a signal is recorded as a digital signal – a bunch of 1s and 0s. You might think at first that this seems very stupid; after all, a digital value starts as less precise than an analogue one. That is, an analogue one might be 1.0225062, which might be stored digitally as 1.023; some information gets lost in the conversion. This is the same reason some audiophiles complain about CD sound; there are some frequencies that simply cannot be reproduced using a digital format. The problem is that tape recording technology is far from perfect.
