I was really angry when my Sony mini DV player stoped working after only a couple of months. It seemed unlikely that the heads could have gotten so dirty so quickly. Turns out I ran into trouble because I bought some cheap DV tapes at salvage store. Acording to the blogosphere different tape brands use different chemicals which when mixed gets you into trouble. Much to my reliefe a few runs with the cleaning tape and it was back to taping my baby girl. Sony DVC Cleaning Tape
I have two different MiniDV cameras that both came up with errors for "dew" and "head needs cleaning" respectively. I bought this tape, popped it in, ran play for 10 seconds, popped it out.
Messages gone. Cameras work perfectly.
Couldn't be simpler.
A month ago my Canon camcorder had these blocky lines going across the view finder. I use my camcorder ALOT and had this ZR500 for over two years. I thought it was malfunctioning due to my high usage and it's age. So I brought a new one but when I stuck one of my old tapes in the new one those same old lines would show up again. NOW WAIT A MINUTE! THIS IS A NEW CAMCORDER! Since the camcorder was new I was eligible for free tech support. When I called Canon they told me that the type I used was contaminated from the old one and I needed a MiniDV cassette cleaner. They had one to sell me for over $35. No thank! So I did some research on amazon.com and saw the great reviews on this Sony cassette for half the price.
I just used it last week on both camcorders and now they both record and play back fine. Here's the caution........... all tapes that were used in the dirty camcorder prior to cleaning need to be thrown away. I noticed that when I tried to transfer the date from the miniDV to my computer the thick lines were back. So after trail and error I regrettably had to throw all the contaminated MiniDVs away. Once I cleaned the old camcorder again with this Sony cassette I used new MiniDV tapes afterwards and never tried to reply any old ones. I am happy to say that it's working good as new. Now I have two camcorders when I could have just cleaned the first one. But I learned a valuable lesson and hope others will learn from my mistake.
This tape is TOP NOTCH!
I bought the Panasonic one at a local store. When you open it, the instructions say don't use this to clean your heads unless your picture quality is already suffering. Yikes!
The Sony product can be used before your images start suffering.
I recently purchased a mini DV cleaning cassette for my video camera at a local electronics store for $24.95. The first time I used it it unwound inside and jammed the camera. I found this NAME BRAND product for much less at Amazon and it worked perfectly. Did a great job of restoring the satisfactory shooting of video and a clear playback on the camera screen.
No repair shop needed.
I had tried to play some older tapes that were sitting around, not in their cases. And sure enough, the playback heads got clogged with the dust that had accumulated on the tapes. The camera wouldn't play back my tapes! They looked like they were blank! But after I used the cleaning tape, the old tapes worked fine!
Be sure to try this before sending your camera in for repair!
It's really hard to rate a cleaning tape for something like this, since you can't really see what it's doing. What I can attest to is once I cleaned my DV camera, the problems I was having with black lines through the video went away. Guess it worked!
For the first time in my Sony video camera's 4.5 year life, I get the "dirty head" notice ON MY SECOND DAY OF MY PARIS TRIP (even with annual pro-cleaning)! And alas, with no cleaning cassette with me and no time to hunt for one, I have to leave it in the hotel room. Thankfully, my digital camera takes movies too (but not quite as good as the video camera), but that's another story.
So I search the internet and the Sony cleaner had the best reviews. They're not wrong, so I don't need to add one more. But after seeing a few questions about how many times you can use this thing, I'd thought I'd try to clarify.
Instructions included say (after inserting cassette into the camera of course):
-Press PLAY or START button. Run for 10 seconds. Press STOP.
-Remove cassette cleaner without rewinding it. Put a regular cassette in to check if the heads are clean.
-If not, run the cleaner again. They suggest to run it NO MORE than five times consecutively (again, 10 seconds at a time without rewinding the tape)
My camera says there's 11 (eleven) minutes of tape in the cassette, so if that's accurate (I don't know if it is because I don't want to forward/rewind the tape), you'll get about six 10-second cleanings a minute, so 66 cleanings for one pass of the entire tape. It says you can rewind and use again ONCE, so about 132 cleanings total. Again, that's if there's actually 11 minutes of cleaning tape on the cassette and you let it run for exactly 10 seconds a shot.
Me being the skeptic, if I get five-10 cleanings before the tape ends, that's 10-20 total, that's still a good deal.
So in my estimation, you'll get between 10-132 cleanings from one cassette (lol, how's that for broad range). So far, I've gotten two with plenty of tape to spare.
Hope this helps. - Sony - Minidv - Minidv Tape - Camcorder Accessories'
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