One of the problems with the iPhone is that the camera and video-cam functionality is just too good. With a minimum of effort you can record images and video that have a remarkably high quality. But if there’s one thing that people who’ve had the Internet and smartphones ever since they were 10 years old can probably agree on, the most cravalicious commodity is authenticity—the kind you get when technologies don’t work quite right, whether it’s the pops and hiss emanating from a vintage LP, the blocky charm of 8-bit video games, or the peculiar aural frisson only a vocoder can supply. Technologies are so advanced that you have to build in your own “human” warp and woof—shit, if not for that, it really becomes hard to tell the automated from the human sometimes.

To paraphrase David Lee Roth, the most important thing in life is sincerity—once you can fake that, you got it made. If sincerity is what you’re after, there are companies who’ll be thrilled to fake it for you—as will, for instance, a visual effects company called Rarevision, which has designed a marvelous app for the iPhone (don’t know about Android) called VHS Camcorder that takes your pristine smartphone video footage and makes it look just like some shitty video that was recorded in the mid-1980s, at the height of the camcorder revolution.

Basically, you can make any clip you record look like some junk that’s all ready for the Bob Saget treatment.

My favorite option is “Tilting Device Makes Things Worse”—“When enabled, moving your device around will mess up the picture.” Also, as the company states, “Phony zoom lens feature dramatically enhances the cheese factor.” These people know what they’re doing; their product page is pretty funny too.

In case you were wondering, YES, you can adjust the date to read a date from the past. Here’s some slightly bizarre footage of an obviously contemporary Starbuck’s—but the footage is date-stamped August 21, 1984. So weird!
 

Coming back from the beach, MiniDV style pic.twitter.com/6MfUcgT7oc

— Fabrizio Rinaldi (@linuz90) August 18, 2015

 
via BoingBoing