The best examples are probably those where there is only an occasional need to send a few images to verify an event, such as an intrusion alarm or a fraudulent transaction. In these instances live video is not usually mandatory and sending high quality snapshots depicting the alarm event is sufficient. For many years VCR's have been successfully used to gather evidence of possible security violations. Time-Lapse recording capability allows a tape to run for 24 hours or more, albeit recording video as a sequence of separate snaps rather than a continuous stream. When combined with a digital multiplexer, a number of cameras can be recorded to one tape offering a major convenience and cost saving for applications where continuous real time recording is not mandatory.
Digital recording has really only become a serious contender in recent years.
Recording images to a computer disk drive has several potential advantages. For these reasons alone, fully digital recording would seem to have overwhelming advantages, but its uptake has been relatively slow. Once again the reason for slow adoption is due to the vast amount of data contained in images. To digitally represent this with absolute accuracy would take several hundred gigabytes of data. Image compression allows the same number of comparable quality images to be recorded on media holding 10 Gigabytes of data or less.