VHS player thinks some tapes are VHS-ET but aren't?

[Eric-Jan]

Not being able to decide (for this player) which mode to go into could also be a "feature" of the S-VHS ET detection ?
playing these "faulty" tapes on another VHS vcr can determine that, other than long discussions about it

[Eric-Jan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by latreche34

According to his own thread the problem was dirty heads not tapes:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vcr-...html#post70165

then why is this thread started ?

[bakerie]

Quote:

According to his own thread the problem was dirty heads not tapes:
Panasonic NV-HS830 not playing tapes, noise, running slow?

Read more: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...#ixzz6W9JE014L

Not to dig up old threads, but I just noticed I never replied to this and feel bad for leaving it.

There are tapes that this machine just can't play and it shows the S-VHS ET flag. There are tapes where I can get them to play by driving the tracking manually as far as it will go, when they aren't playing it shows the the S-VHS ET flag. When the heads where dirty and it wouldn't play anything, it was continually showing the S-VHS ET flag.

So either that flag just comes on when it can't lock to a standard, or there is an issue with this VCR that it defaults to S-VHS ET when it gets confused. It's over 10 years old, so I can't really fault it

I will say the automatic tracking on it is abysmal, I had to manually track nearly everything. (but again, old machine, caps could be dead in the tracking circuit)