I bought a JVC GR-DX77 last January. It's been excellent and I've used about
1 tape per month to record my daughter who was born in March 05. At the
beginning of the year I started getting problems (most notably
'condensation, please wait' randomly appearing). I returned it to Comet and
when it came back the repair note said they had replaced the tape deck.
Everything seemed fine until yesterday when I tried to load some footage
from a few months ago onto my PC. The picture was fine but the sound is
intermittent.

Further investigation shows that _any_ tape from before the repair
(including the footage taken on the day I bought the thing) can not now be
played back or loaded onto the PC as the sound does keeps cutting out (not a
regular pattern but almost 1 second on, one second off). I have tried the
tapes on two camcorders from work and get the same results. The sound was
always set to 12 bit and I never used LP.

It seems obvious now that the unit was faulty from day 1 but the problem I
have now is that I have more than a dozen valuable (from a sentimental point
of view) MiniDV tapes which are useless. I have been back to Comet who say
'don't know what we can do about it, guv' and I've not had a response to my
e-mail from JVC yet.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how I might be able to recover these
tapes either by doing something myself or finding someone who can?

TIA

Geoff

Does anyone have any suggestions about how I might be able to recover these
tapes either by doing something myself or finding someone who can?

Were you recording in Long Play mode, to conserve tape? Compatibility
between different machines in LP is a frequent problem. But I expect
plenty of your friends have DV cameras. You might be lucky and find
one that likes your tapes, which can then be easily dubbed.

If you were recording in SP mode, I'm a little more worried. What
faults were you seeing APART from the condensation warning? A bad
condensation sensor is a nuisance, but it's a minor fault that has no
necessary connection with general misalignment. But these other
warnings you mention may be interesting.

I'm betting on you coming back with "Yes, it was LP mode I was using".

In message , Laurence Payne
writes
Does anyone have any suggestions about how I might be able to recover these
tapes either by doing something myself or finding someone who can?

Were you recording in Long Play mode, to conserve tape?

Quote from Geoff's post:

"and I never used LP".

--
Tony Morgan

"Geoff Sharpe" wrote in message
...

Does anyone have any suggestions about how I might be able to recover
these
tapes either by doing something myself or finding someone who can?

Take the camera and one of the duff tapes back to comet. Ask to play the
tape on one of their other models of DV camera.

You're either experiencing a poor-quality recording or poor-quality
playback. If it's bad in a couple of Comet's cameras, it's the former. If
it's just bad in the JVC, it's the latter.

If you can avoid 12bit audio on MiniDV, you should. 12bit is only useful if
you want to record two distinct stereo tracks. I've not yet worked out how
you can split these once the DV file is on the computer, so even though I
could probably make use of two audio tracks, I never do.

"Geoff Sharpe" wrote in
message ...
I bought a JVC GR-DX77 last January. It's been excellent and I've
used about
1 tape per month to record my daughter who was born in March 05. At
the
beginning of the year I started getting problems (most notably
'condensation, please wait' randomly appearing). I returned it to
Comet and
when it came back the repair note said they had replaced the tape
deck.
Everything seemed fine until yesterday when I tried to load some
footage
from a few months ago onto my PC. The picture was fine but the
sound is
intermittent.

snip

Sounds like a head alignment issue, either it was wrong before or is
now, your problem is knowing which, as Gareth says, you need to try a
'before and after' tape in a *known* good deck (one that is known to
be in spec') - If the deck is now within spec, meaning that the old
deck wasn't, I would suggest approaching a pro tape dubbing company
to attempt to dub your older tapes as they will have pro deck that
should have means to adjust tracking etc.

I'm not going to suggest how to deal with Comet or JVC over this
though, if you read your warranty I suspect that you will find that
any liability ends with the camera and not the tapes or their
content - as is the case with most still cameras - any settlement
will have to be agreed one to one IYSWIM.