Dirty Head or Degrading Tape?

[nazopo]

Hello, I recently have been transferring my old VHS tapes to digital files. And I wanted to recapture one of the tapes. When I played the tape again this is what I saw when compared to the first capture: as you can see there are artifacts in the second picture and the artifacts remain there for almost the entire duration of the tape. Some of the other tapes have the same artifacts in them, while others have no artifacts in them? So if anyone can tell me what is the cause for this then I would greatly appreciate it.

[2Bdecided]

Could be dirty head (have you cleaned it?)

Could be damaged or worn out head too. Or maybe strange mistracking. Or some bizarre kind of interference getting within the VCR itself.

I bet the tapes are fine, but they may not be if you keep playing them on this faulty machine.


Dirty or worn head, or tape damage (but not looking like this!), is most likely if it's visible on some tapes but not others. It's very common for worn, damaged or misaligned heads to give different results on different tapes, because some tapes will be more "correct" than others, so those at the edge of tolerance will show visible faults first - whether that's due to head angle, head wear, etc, when the tape was first recorded.

Cheers,
David.

[nazopo]

We got our VCR from an old lady at a garage sale about a year ago. It is a Sharp VC-H810. I'm suspecting it's 9 or 10 years old. Right after we got it we cleaned the heads. We haven't used it very much since we got it. After I put that one tape in, every tape I put in which consists of home recordings has those artifacts in them (except these two): the rest look like this:

[filmboss80]

The diagonal lines are a classic sign of a bad cable, or at least a poorly-shielded one. Change out the cable and make sure your playback unit is not to close to a strong magnetic field.

[2Bdecided]

The diagonal lines are a classic sign of a bad cable, or at least a poorly-shielded one.

I thought that, and it might be true, but look closely at the pictures - the classic VHS "worn head" white flecks are coming off the edges of the interference. They couldn't do that if the interference was generated / picked up outside the VCR.

Those white flecks are generated at the head, which suggests the interference problem is at the head too. Could be wrong. Magnetic field might be the problem.

Cheers,
David.

[filmboss80]

I only spoke of the diagonal lines being a bad cable. I believe the white flecks are a separate issue--possibly head wear.

You may have 2 different things going on.

[johns0]

The tapes can also look like that if they were recorded with dirty heads,try recording with a good tape in slp and you will know if the heads are still good.

[nazopo]

I recently just put the same tape in and the issue is gone: Here is it originally: here is the recent recording:
I haven't tried the other tapes yet. Would a hard drive interfere with it?