The following list covers consumer equipment only (for other formats, see videotape):
Analog
Video8 Camcorder
Lo-Band: Approximately 3 MHz bandwidth (250 lines EIA resolution, or ~333x480 edge-to-edge)
BCE (1954): First tape storage for video, manufactured by Bing Crosby Entertainment from Ampex equipment
BCE Color (1955): First color tape storage for video, manufactured by Bing Crosby Entertainment from Ampex equipment
Simplex (1955): Developed commercially by RCA and used to record live broadcasts by NBC
Quadruplex videotape (1955): Developed formally by Ampex, this was the recording standard for 20 years.
Vision electronic recording apparatus (Vera) (1955): An experimental recording standard developed by the BBC, it was never used or sold commercially.
U-matic (1971): Tape originally used by Sony to record video
U-matic S (1974): A smaller version of U-matic, used for portable recorders
Betamax (1975): Used on old Sony and Sanyo camcorders and portables; obsolete by the late 1980s in the consumer market
VHS (1976): Compatible with VHS VCRs; no longer manufactured
VHS-C (1982): Originally designed for portable VCRs, this standard was later adapted for compact consumer camcorders; identical in quality to VHS; cassettes play in VHS VCRs with an adapter. Still available in the low-end consumer market. Relatively short running time compared to other formats.
Video8 (1985): Small-format tape developed by Sony to compete with VHS-C's palm-sized design; equivalent to VHS or Betamax in picture quality
Hi-Band: Approximately 5 MHz bandwidth (420 lines EIA resolution, or ~ 550x480 edge-to-edge)
U-matic BVU (1982): Largely used in high-end consumer and professional equipment
U-matic BVU-SP (1985): Largely used in high-end consumer and professional equipment
S-VHS (1987): Largely used in mid-range consumer and prosumer equipment
S-VHS-C (1987): Limited to low-end consumer market
Hi8 (1988): Used in low to mid-range consumer equipment but also was available as prosumer/industrial equipment
Digital
Sony Handycam DCR-IP7BT MICROMV camcorder and Sony MICROMV tape (top), compared with MiniDV and Hi8 tapes
DV (1995): Initially developed by Sony, the DV standard became the most widespread standard-definition digital camcorder technology for the next decade.[citation needed] Users could connect their DV camcorders to their computers, using 4- or 6-pin FireWire sockets then common on computers.[23]
DVCPRO (1995): Panasonic released its own variant of the DV format for broadcast news-gathering.
DVD recordable (1996): A variety of recordable optical disc standards were released by multiple manufacturers during the 1990s and 2000s, of which DVD-RAM was the first. The most common in camcorders was MiniDVD-R, which used recordable 8 cm discs holding 30 minutes of MPEG video.
D-VHS (1998): JVC's VHS tape supporting 720p/1080i HD; many units also supported IEEE 1394 recording.
Digital8 (1999): Uses Hi8 tapes; most can read older Video8 and Hi8 analog tapes.
MICROMV (2001): Matchbox-sized cassette. Sony was the only electronics manufacturer for this format, and editing software was proprietary to Sony and only available on Microsoft Windows; however, open source programmers did manage to create capture software for Linux.[24]
HDV (2004): Records up to an hour of HDTV MPEG-2 signal on a MiniDV cassette
MPEG-2 codec-based format: Records MPEG-2 program stream or MPEG-2 transport stream to various kinds of tapeless standard and HD media (hard disks, solid-state memory, etc.).
H.264: Compressed video using the H.264 codec in an MPEG-4 file; usually stored in tapeless media
AVCHD: Puts H.264 video into a transport-stream file format; compressed in H.264 format (not MPEG-4)
Multiview Video Coding: Amendment to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression for sequences captured from multiple cameras using a single video stream; backwards-compatible with H.264
