Images saved on video tape are vulnerable to time, usage, and storage conditions. This vulnerability makes magnetic video tape unsuitable as a long term storage medium. Anytime you play your video, do a search or copy to another tape, every time a tape is played back, a small amount of the tape's surface and data is permanently removed. That's why the magnetic head of VCR gets "dirty". Playing a tape just only 5 times is roughly equivalent to storing that tape for 1 year. After just 5 years of storage, a video tape will have an observable loss in picture and sound quality. If a tape experiences high humidity and raised temperature, it will degrade faster. On the average, a video tape stored under normal conditions, maintains its video quality for approximately only 10 to 15 years. DVDs have much longer life span. The quality of video will be retained for hundreds of years, without a single bit of data loss! And of course, no rewinding, much smaller storage space,.........