I've used pretty much all of those. And you know what? It doesn't make the slightest difference as far as I can see, except when tape lubrication conflicts and you get dropouts for a few minutes due to head clogging after changing tape types.

Basically it's all digital, so the bits are either there or not there: until the signal degrades so much that the bits can't be read reliably you'll get perfect playback every time.

cheers so head cleaning is a very good idea? should i do that after every tape or day? cheers

You might want to clean the heads whenever you switch between tape brands or types, but then you potentially run the risk of wearing out the heads. Personally I just record a minute or so of color bars at the start, and that normally clears out any junk from the heads... dropouts are rarely a problem after that.

Yeah. Also, if you have a panasonic camera- only use panasoinic dv tapes.

Panasonic uses a dry lubrication while sony uses a wet lubrication on their tapes which can clog the heads of a panasonic camera.

It's more complicated than that: as far as I'm aware, most modern Sony DV tapes now use dry lubrication and some Panasonic tapes use wet lubrication.

In fact, the best way to avoid head clogs may be to regularly switch tape types so that you don't give the camera time to build up deposits of one type of lubricant on the heads. That's effectively what I've been doing in my TRV900 while shooting and editing for other people, and I've never had a clogged-up head that lasted more than a minute or so.

If you use dry lubricated panasonic dv tapes in a pansonic camera, you won't have many problems.

ok ill go with the JVC there the cheapest

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