is there a solution for keeping mini dv tapes clean?

**clarity** · 27th April 2004

all the time my cassettes are getting dirty!!! it's not the heads in my camcorder, it's the tapes. I clean the heads of my camcorder periodically and they stay clean but all the time my tapes are getting distorted because I don't know how to keep them clean! I'll get grey bars goin across the screen or really bad artifacts and fragments of the image lodged in one spot, all kinds of stuff. and then when I go into record mode and press the record button, I get the message, "cleaning cassette, cleaning cassette," yadda yadda... what can I do? what can I do?

**Q-Buster** · 27th April 2004

Wish I knew the answer, my Sony Digital 8 seems to suffer from the same thing

. When you first start to use it, after about 10 minutes or so I get the "cleaning cassette, cleaning cassette," message too - well, most times anyway. Now I never take it anywhere with out the head cleaner.

Q-Buster

**Deadly** · 28th April 2004

Thats strange, i've got a sony digital 8 camera aswell, and i've never had this problem, fingers crossed.
Are you positive its not a fault in the camera? just a thought. Good luck fixing it!

**Q-Buster** · 29th April 2004

Well, I used it to copy my old Video 8 recordings onto my PC to make VCD's, and I think it may have picked a bit of crap up from these older tapes. Plus the fact that the camcorder tends to only come out once a year these days, when I go on holiday, fill a couple of tapes up and never watch them again

Q-Buster

**_Belial** · 6th May 2004

that's weird, i've been using digital8 for years now and must have 25+ tapes done and never experienced this problem, I generally tend to capture my tapes to dvd once i've finished a tape though so do very little playback of the tapes once they're mastered, but i'm sure i'd have noticed the problems you're experiencing now if it was a generic digital8 problem.