From 2004 to 2006 I taught an introductory film history course in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University covering cinema’s first five decades. While approximately twenty-five percent of the students taking this course were enrolled in the department’s film production major and were actively creating their own 16mm films, the remain- ing students were largely taking the course out of personal interest or to fulfill requirements for other degrees. As such, the majority of students were not nec- essarily familiar with the technical differences between film and video, nor their variability in image quality. In order to demonstrate this distinction, a compari- son was undertaken.
