Head cleaning

[jparnold]

Firstly sorry for posting this here but I cannot find a suitable forum and can't find another suitable web site for this hardware question.

How often should the head cleaning tape be played in a mini DV camera?
Should it be on a regular basis (eg after every x tapes) or only when problems start to occur?
The reason for the question is that I have heard that head cleaning tapes wear the heads but also don't want to find too late that I should have cleaned the heads and ended up with unusable tapes when it's too late.
Thanks

[sjj1805]

A good and valid question. When you buy a head cleaning tape it should include an instruction sheet giving advice about how often to clean the heads and how many times the tape head cleaner can be used before it needs replacing.

Here are some Google Links:
http://www.datman.com/tbul/dmtb_036.htm
http://www.aspen-media.com/loadcontent.asp?id=17
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... l/apb.html

The above links and more can be found in this Google Search

From past experience there are two types of cleaner - wet and dry.
One word of caution about wet systems - make sure that the tape heads have thoroughly dried before inserting a tape otherwise you will end up with heads dirtier than before you started.

[daniel]

Tongue-in-cheek of course: buy a Panasonic camcorder.
The error correcting code does not run on the display/viewfinder data.
So when you get lines or other picture problems on the LCD/viewfinder, run the cleaning tape. Your recordings are still good enough, the miracle of digital.
Of course I don't know about other brands, maybe they all do that...


(well miracle is also tongue-in-cheek; when it finally fails it gets dramatic...)

To answer your initial question is impossible; it depends on so many factors: average humidity, quantity and quality of dust (quartz, lime, tobacco, very sticky), how often you open the mechanism, the surface quality of the tapes and how often you use a new cassette; the first passage of a tape on the heads is catastrophic, the transport mechanism actually cleans the tape of everything not deeply glued, and believe me it's VERY small sized stuff.

My advice: use an old camera to write a continuous time code on each tape. You have the benefit of a good TC and you keep the clog out of your best camera.