Those words make me sad.
Well anyway my XL1s did the same thing when it was new (about 2 hrs on it) back in early 2004. I was shooting a wedding and when I reviewed the footage I could not believe it. At the time I did not have a back up camera but luckily this footage was not crucial. I now run a cleaning tape before any important event and I'm going to add fastforwarding and rewinding the tape beforehand as well.

100's of hours on my old XL-1s with Sony stock (yeah, blue ones). Few drop outs. Barely cleaned the thing. But the sitting around for a few years thing and running a tape back and forth - yeah, ok - I'll buy that.

I have a JVC HD250 and within the first 5 hours I had similar issues. I have two tape types - Panasonic and JVC Pro HD stuff. I was told they spin off from the master reel...

That was my point about NOS camcorders (new old stock). Since you bought an unused XL1S, that's exactly what you have -- new old stock -- and as you found out, years of inactivity can cause problems with the tape transport. For anybody who is storing a camcorder long term, it's a good idea to cycle a tape all the way to the end and rewind it again about once a month or so to avoid this kind of trouble.

Glad to hear it's working out for you.

Chris's comments remind me of one other point.

All of those nice shiny metal parts would probably be just fine after a brief clean-up to remove any dust and vapor applied stuff that have built up over the years of inactivity. But, what can deteriorate without hope for cleaning is the rubber parts, such as pinch rollers. They don't just get dirty, they break down. These rollers maintain proper tension and such on the tapes and could be the cause of your problems Jeff. They were always the biggest problem with the old 8-track music players, if any of you are old enough to remember them and also with cassette players too. They caused all of those tapes to get "eaten."

The rollers tend to do one of two things, get harder and slip, or they break down and get sticky which will cause the tape to try to wrap around the roller itself. Perhaps you can have just them checked out and changed. They will/would/may improve with usage and glaze removal, but better to have them checked out.

Good luck!

Mike

WOW!!! Canon suprised me; I purchased my camera, joined Canon's XL club and they gave me a year of warranty, so they worked on my camera for free and said if I have any other issues to send it in and they would work on it for free for the next year. I got it back yesterday and so far it works great!

Welcome to the club ;)

Reading that made me wince and smile at the same time! There’s one perk to still using these “near antiques.” Last week I was standing near a high precipice wanting to shoot some rappelling SWAT guys for inclusion in a recruiting video. The firemen in charge couldn’t let me so I just tossed my XL1s to the one guy and he taped for me. If I had the XH A1 I’m hoping to buy one of these days I wonder if I would have been so quick to hand it over and allow it to hang over a drop like that. I know for a fact I wouldn’t have let a new camera eat all the dust we kicked up in that desert. :)

If we work at it hard enough we can still get some pretty good images out of these ol’ dinosaurs, though, I think mine are finally on their last legs.