Tape age
 

Anyone know what the shelf life of the Panny MQ tapes are??

If only I knew what that was...

He's asking about the 'life expectancy' (shelf life) of the Pannasonic tapes. Don't rightly know. As long as they are stored properly, in a cool dry place. Rewound occasionally... I would guess at least five, maybe ten years?

Regardless of the claims made about the great longevity of optical disks, my experience is that highgrade tapes are very dependable and long-lasting, by comparison. My ME and also MP tapes for Hi-8 and BetaCam SP are getting as much as 17 years in age now and I've had no significant failures with them so far.

A lot really does depend on storage. I've got beta SP tapes that show drop outs that are twenty years old, but I know for a fact, for a number of years they were stored in an attic that was hot and humid.

Bottom line. Take GOOD care of your media. And every so often, back it up.

Here's why I ask...I've been experiencing a persistant head clogging problem on my Panasonic DVX 100A. This has been occurring since I opened a new box of tapes (5) and shooting for the past week.

I manually cleaned the heads each time the head cleaning indicator lit up on the camera when I've been shooting. This past weekend I did a thorough manual cleaning but yesterday it started blinking again after the first tape. I even used the previously-unused, head cleaning tape. But I still get the heads clogged error message. Camera has about 132 hours and has been well maintained.

I'm thinking maybe the tapes may be the problem as they over 1 year old and haven't been stored well. They went with me on an overseas trip last year to a hot climate and have since been stored in a cabinet in my home. Not climate controlled.

Any ideas??

Were the tapes sealed in plastic?

Were you switching between brands? A year or two shouldn't make any difference for new tapes still in their wrappers I should think. Could be problems caused by a change in tape lubrication formulation. (See the NUMEROUS threads on the pros and cons of changing tape brands often or never)

No, I've always used the MQ Panasonic line although I did shoot a few weeks ago with a lesser quality Panasonic tape. But only 2 tapes.

Tapes were new and wrapped in the packaging.

ehh, I switch between the different grades of Panny tapes all the time and have had no problems so far, so I wouldn't worry about that.

10 year half life...
 

I used to work on the retail side of electronics and one thing that we were taught towards tape life, was that a VHS type of media had a shelf life under "normal" (I guess putting it on the shelf in your living room) conditions of 10 years. Meaning that by the way that magnetic media works (individually polarized segments of a magnetic media side by side) that over time each units polarity had the possibility of eventually effecting the polarity of the unit beside it, and that after 10 years, you would "lose" about half of the original image quality.

Now, at the time we were really trying to push DVD players as the "wave of the future", so that information may have been slanted to one side.

Just my two cents on shelf life, if there is anyone out there that knows more about this, I'd love to hear...

In regards to the issue that you're having, Jim, I would try to isolate the problem and buy a couple of new tapes and see if the problem persist. No more problem = bad tapes, prolonged problem = camera issue.

I hope you get it all sorted out...

Kevin

My problem was finally resolved with new tape stock. I used the new Panasonic AY-DVM63AMQ tape stock and had no more head clogging.