Digital 8 tapes showing wear

[jstevens30]

Last Summer I sent my Sony Digital 8 DCR-TRV 530 camcorder in for repair. Everything has been fine with the camcorder since getting back.

My question is I have multiple Digital 8 tapes that are 10 years plus and I played some tapes over the weekend and the quality of tapes playback is not the best quality.

Is there a cassette Tape that I can purchase in order to try to clean the path that the tape is played on in the camcorder so the tapes may play back in Better quality? Do the cleaning tapes tapes do the job to improve the path the tapes travel in the camcorder?

Please advise.

[Brad]

You're certain these are Digital8 tapes? If it's reading the tapes without obvious errors, you're getting the best you're going to get.

The only possible source of quality loss is in the way the data is decoded; i.e. the chroma needs to be upsampled and it sounds like you're using the analog outputs of the camcorder for playback.

[jstevens30]

Yes, I am using analog playback into my TV. If I use fire wire into the PC will the quality be better? Go from fire wire to PC and put on DVD.

[Brad]

A Firewire transfer will be better, technically speaking.

Will it look better to you? It all depends on how discerning you are. This comparison may give you some idea.

I would recommend transferring the tapes to your PC via Firewire and keeping those files as backups regardless of whether you also make a DVD version.

EDIT: I also left out the display side of things when I was speaking about sources of quality loss. If you viewed on a flat-panel TV, you're limited by how well the TV is able to convert to digital, deinterlace, and scale. You're further limited if you used a composite connection instead of S-Video.

[mike20021969]

the quality of tapes playback is not the best quality.

In what way?