[chip-douglas]

Hi, I have a sony DCR-TRV27 miniDV camera. Unfortunately, I didn't buy a head cleaning cassette when I purchased the camera. To make things worse, there isn't a place to buy one within a 1 hour drive from here.

A friend said to just use a q-tip and rubbing alcohol to clean the heads, but I don't think he realises how hard that is on a hand-held camera. I tried anyways.

My question is, exactly what parts do I need to clean? Which ones read the tape for video and audio? I cleaned a little copper looking chip in the back left, the drum right in the middle, a little blue and clear plastic optics looking thing in the middle, and 4 leads that I think are for the memory function. Am I missing anything? Does it take a long time to do by hand. Playback and recording are better, but sound still cuts out a bit and the picture still pixelates some, even on cassettes that play ok on other cameras.

Also, I don't believe it is a hardware problem, because if I record an MPEG on the memory stick, it plays back perfectly. Grrr.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

[CollinG3G4]

Originally posted by chip-douglas:

A friend said to just use a q-tip and rubbing alcohol to clean the heads

Please tell me you're joking!

Just get the tape....

[chip-douglas]

Like I said in the original post, not a single place in my area has the cassettes. I called both camera shops, checked the local mac store, Wal-Mart, Target, K-mart and every other place under the sun. I would have had to drive to Phoenix to get one.

Yeah, I can order it over the internet, but that would have taken a few days. The purpose of trying to clean it myself was so I could tape a solo cross country flight to California. Hopefully, I'll have a cleaning cassette by this weekend, but it would have been nice to have been able to send a dvd to my parents to show them where all of my money has gone.

[warnergt]

I also have a DCR-TRV27 miniDV camera. I had a playback problem where there were a couple bands in the video. Oddly, the top 1/4 of the screen was perfect; the next 1/4 was all noise; the third 1/4 was perfect and the bottom 1/4 was all noise. I thought I broke something.

I experimented and experimented but the problem didn't go away. Then, I tried to record. The camera must have detected a problem because it immediately displayed a big "CLEANING HEADS" on the screen. After a little while, the message went away and my playback was again working perfectly.

It was a strange experience. Apparently, the camera has some built-in mechanism for cleaning the heads.

[chip-douglas]

Heh, yeah, I almost got them to go away from only using it in the house; but I don't think it will go away on its own for me. Arizona is one of the dustiest places that I have ever seen. Any time we take it out hiking or off roading, bam, it needs to be cleaned badly. Thanks for the info though.

Here's another question for you though since you have the same model as I. Have you had any luck filming or taking pictures at night. Low light conditions suck with the 27 model, but even under a full moon it won't take decent video or stills. I'd be interested in any experiences you've had at night with it.
Thanks again

[warnergt]

It's hard to say. I only did a little bit of night filming on the beach. I used the built-in infrared lights to illuminate my subjects (there's a control to turn them on). That's a pretty cool feature. I haven't really done any night filming beyond that.