The archival stability of metal evaporated tape for consumer digital VCRs

A new metal evaporated (ME) tape was released for consumer digital VCRs. It has greatly improved its recording characteristics and durability compared with conventional Hi‐8ME tape. Demagnetization of the new ME tape has been studied using accelerated and ambient conditions. Demagnetization of saturation magnetization follows the cubic law, and it was found that the estimated archival lifetime is about 60 years. Moreover, we have investigated characteristics such as dropout, carrier‐to‐noise ratio, and error rate, and we confirmed that the new ME tape has enough stability for practical applications.