HELP!!! I made the critical mistake of using Hi8 tapes in my DCR-TRV310 for convenience (and because I'm cheap). Now I'm having playback issues and the tapes won't play on another camcorder.

During playback, the image is distorted with digital blocks on the right side of the screen that display vertically. These blocks seem to lag behind the rest of the image whenever the playback pans or moves (which is almost always for my movies). I tried cleaning the head and using compressed air to clear the head openings. It worked to let me recover one tape, but now the image and sound are more distored than ever.....with whole lines of digital lag in movement and a general skipping on the sound.

Thank goodness I converted most movies to DVD a couple of years ago, but I've still got about 2-years worth of movies I need to save. Does anyone know if there is a fixable situation for this????

The Sony DCR-TRV310 is a Digital8 camcorder.

Tapes labeled Digital8 or Hi8 are the same. In fact the newer ones are labeled Digital8/Hi8.

Your problems are probably from changing tapes, using cheap tapes, not running a tape head cleaning tape before changing brands, possibly recording in LP mode instead of SP mode or possibly using an 8mm (Video8) tape or a combination of the above.

Trying to use compressed air to clear the tape heads is a bad idea and can destroy the heads...




Rich

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Are you saying the head is shot? I hate to replace it to get the tapes downloaded since I've already moved to a high def camcorder last year.

The tapes were recorded in standard mode, however some of them ran at double speed (60 minute tape only held 30 minutes) when recorded in Digital8 mode.

You need to have a professonial camcorder repair person look at it.

There is nothing else you can do to it to fix it.





Rich

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