LG N9391 VCR distorted picture on SP, not LP mode?
 

Hi all,

I just joined the forum the other day after reading all the useful information on here for many weeks. My PAL LG N9391 that I've had for probably 20+ years has developed a problem. When I play any normal SP mode tapes the picture is extremely snowy and rolls to the point where the screen goes blue and the message 'DUST ON THE HEADS !' appears on screen. This problem is not present on any LP Mode tapes or when a tape is paused. The search function i.e. fast forward and rewind when playing also appear normal on screen. So, I opened up the VCR and tried cleaning the head as recommended in a lot of posts on this forum, I was extremely careful. Only a little dirt came off on the paper. I've really looked after this VCR over the years and I think that it might be that the head has simply broken after all these years. When lightly touching the head you can feel one head protruding but the other one not so much - not sure if that is relevant.

Grateful for anyone's thoughts on this!

Yep, pretty relevant, 4 head VCR's use a pair of heads for SP and the other pair for LP speed. One of your SP heads is gone, Sorry to rain in your parade.

That's OK, I was thinking if a gentle clean didn't resolve the problem then it would be game over for my VCR anyway. Thanks for your reply. On a side note, I've recently picked up a JVC HR-S7700 which I'm really pleased with so far. I'll be delving into VHS capture in the near future if I can get my hands on the right USB capture device. I've done some with a DVD recorder in the past but I wasn't overly impressed with the quality. Also used an Adaptec Vide-oh! before, some years ago which was kind of OK for short clips.

Yah in the past 20 years or so people captured to different formats, DigiBeta, DV, DVD ...etc but now with enormous storage capacity of HDD's and SSD's and the blazing speed of modern CPU's it makes a lot of sense to capture lossless, save the master files and encode from there to any format that comes along in the future without the worry of where it is physically stored or whether you have the player to play that physical media or not.

It's incredible how time flies! I've decided I'll be aiming to get some lossless captures that I'm happy with for archive purposes, then I can decide if I want to convert to whatever format from there. The clock is ticking though and I feel the time is right to get capturing. :congrats: