head cleaning questions

April 30, 2005

I have a dvx100a with about 120 hours on it and all 120 hours have been shot on panasonic tapes either PQ or MQ. I didn't use it for about a month when I was out of town and the first time I turned it on after not using it, it gave me the heads are dirty warning message. So I have two questions:

I was once told that using a head cleaner significantly reduces the life of the heads, is this true?

I've shot maybe 5 hours since the warning message appeared and haven't noticed anydropouts, have I been really lucky or should I not worry

adam

Laurent Andrieux · April 30, 2005

120 hours is not a big amount. If you didn't work in a dusty environnment with it, and if the images are clean, I would not care about this message and wouldn't clean the heads if not necessary.

Josh Hill · May 1, 2005

I don't know. I've shot less than 100 or so hours with my XL1s and when my "CLEAN HEADS" message appeared it hadn't shot any of the footage from earlier in that day. It finished out the day and now won't shoot or playback anything at all.

Just my experience. I'm going to take my camera to get it serviced whenever school is out, and if it costs too much to service, I may very well either buy a new video camera or just shoot film.

Phil Rhodes · May 1, 2005

Hi,

I recently had my AG-DVC200 cleaned out - I've been doing all these house-reconstruction things and it was full of plaster dust - but it wasn't clogging the heads so much as making the rollers stick. Cost about £95 for the extremely nice people at LRC Video in London to do it in two hours while I went off and had a very pleasant wander around the British Museum - not a bad day in all!

Phil