Guys, the Canon HV20 manual P92 says,

'To maintain the best picure quality we recommend using Canon (dry tapes).....and cleaning the heads frequently with a Canon xxxx cleaning cassette or a commercially available dry cleaning cassette. Do not use wet type cleaning cassettes as this may damage the camcorder'.

Most manufacturers recommend changing the DV heads and tape guides after 1000hrs record/play. That's one heck of a lot of tapes, I'd say you'd update the A1 before you run the heads out. So I play the cleaner for 10-15 seconds before every A1 shoot, I always use new DV tape.

I cleaned my A1 soon as I got it with a Panasonic (dry) cleaner tape and use Pana 83min MQ tapes. No dropouts till one day I changed tapes on a windy dusty airfield.

After many years running pro magnetic recorders, I'd never use a liquid and cloth or dry buds in a miniDV transport. Lint or cotton strands could easily get in the system.

Cheers.

That's what chamois swabs are made for :)

Absolutely--use chamois swabs only if you do it manually. Back in the "old days" (ie., shooting Betacam with a BVW300) I was religious about manual head cleaning, pulling the side off the camera and doing it manually. In that camera the head life was only around 750 hours, and I always got at least the minimum. In talking with a Sony tech lining up my first head replacement, I asked about cleaning and he recommended using the cleaning tape for 5 seconds every 50 hours. I've been doing that ever since with a variety of cameras, including DVCAM and HDV. Properly used the cleaning tape doesn't harm the heads. But like anything else the key phrase there is "properly used."

While Canon never said in the manual to clean the heads when you get the camera out of the box, it's been common knowledge on this board for a long time. Do a search and you'll see lots of posts about it.