dirty Heads or defective head? at DVinfo.net

Billy Mallari · February 14th, 2007, 10:12 AM

I shot a wedding last October and I noticed that the head on my DVX100 was dirty (blinking light). I thought that was okay after 100hrs of use. I have not use it since and started shooting a wedding last week..Again, an error message and says that the head is dirty? How could that possibly be. So I used again the tape cleaner and luckily, it did not act up the rest of the day.

My question is, what could possibly be wrong with my camera tape deck? Did you guys have this experience before?

Noah Kadner · February 24th, 2007, 01:37 PM

Do you have a head cleaner? Try running it.

Richard Alvarez · February 24th, 2007, 02:55 PM

Heads can get clogged quickly under a number of conditions. Dirty 'air' getting into the transport system - for example opening the door under dirty conditions. Dirty 'tapes' can be introduced into the system, that is tapes that have dirt on them are loaded and played/recorded on the transport. FAULTY tapes that have bad coatings can clog heads quickly.

And finally, the much discussed problem of introducing alternate lubricants to the track path IE: switching from wet to dry or dry to wet tape lubricants.

So yeah, make sure you run a tape head cleaner every so often.

February 14th, 2007, 10:12 AM	#1
Billy Mallari Regular Crew Join Date: Dec 2005 Posts: 84	dirty Heads or defective head? I shot a wedding last October and I noticed that the head on my DVX100 was dirty (blinking light). I thought that was okay after 100hrs of use. I have not use it since and started shooting a wedding last week..Again, an error message and says that the head is dirty? How could that possibly be. So I used again the tape cleaner and luckily, it did not act up the rest of the day. My question is, what could possibly be wrong with my camera tape deck? Did you guys have this experience before?

February 24th, 2007, 01:37 PM	#2
Noah Kadner Better than Halle Berry Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 435	Do you have a head cleaner? Try running it.

February 24th, 2007, 02:55 PM	#3
Richard Alvarez Inner Circle Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: San Mateo, CA Posts: 3,840	Heads can get clogged quickly under a number of conditions. Dirty 'air' getting into the transport system - for example opening the door under dirty conditions. Dirty 'tapes' can be introduced into the system, that is tapes that have dirt on them are loaded and played/recorded on the transport. FAULTY tapes that have bad coatings can clog heads quickly. And finally, the much discussed problem of introducing alternate lubricants to the track path IE: switching from wet to dry or dry to wet tape lubricants. So yeah, make sure you run a tape head cleaner every so often.