Sony Digital8 PAL camera not recognizing LP NTSC tapes?
 

Recently I got myself a Sony Digital8 Camera (DCR-TRV120E PAL).
It can play 8mm/Hi8 tapes too, even if they are NTSC.
The only problem that it has is the fact that it does not recognize NTSC tapes that are recorded in LP.
NTSC tapes that are recorded in SP play with no problems (and the camera outputs the video as True NTSC, not PAL, which I think is great).
On the other hand, LP NTSC tapes are recognized by the camera as SP instead of LP. Because of that, they run faster (2x I think), the audio is high-pitched and there´s constant rolling bars across the screen.
Is this simply a limitation of the camera´s mechanism or is the camera unable to recognize that the tape is in LP for some reason or another?

Check the manual. I believe you may find it reads,
"Playing back an NTSC-recorded tape:
You can play back tapes recorded in the NTSC video system on the LCD screen, if the tape is recorded in the SP mode."

This implies it will not (reliably at least) playback tapes recorded NTSC LP.

Thanks a lot for your reply! I guess I will have to buy an NTSC Digital8 camera for NTSC LP tapes.

If what you need is a player for NTSC analog LP tapes, you might want to look into a Hi8 camcorder with TBC, etc. rather than another D8 unit. 8mm LP is apparently pretty fussy, I assume for tracking. The Sony D8 manuals recommend that even D8 LP tapes are best played in the same camcorder that recorded them. Most Sony D8 manuals also include caveats about general problems with analog playback like "the picture may have noise when playing back analog tapes" or "some analog tapes may not play properly", this even on D8 units that are made to playback analog 8mm (some simply cannot at all).

Whatever you pursue, read the manual carefully before you buy. Sony has most of the late 90"s and later manuals available for download.

BW

Sounds pretty good. Like most 'non-standard' play types the actual standard can be a bit vague and wooly, similarly it is is with VHS SP/LP/(EP).

The main issue I imagine is the heads, if they're a pair of digital heads the gap may be 'good enough' for SP reproduction but not of the right type for LP reproduction.

With LP the tape moves slower but the head spins just as fast, so the track pitch is tighter, much less space between the centers line of successive scans. A head that is the proper width to read a SP track optimally will likely pickup some from the adjacent tracks on an LP recording. (That is why the better VHS recorders use separate heads for EP playback - to avoid cross talk form adjacent scans).

IMO: LP/EP recording was largely a cheap-out to save tape cost at a significant quality loss, and occasionally for long events where there was no chance to take a few seconds to insert a new tape. It is only with the advent of better recording capability (e.g., DV, HDV, and HD) that the extent of the quality loss was fully appreciated by most people.

Unlike making movies, there are no retakes on life.

Yeah it's possible they used slightly different head with/gap for PAL and NTSC like on VHS and betamax. 8mm also only one pair of video heads afaik rather than separate SP, hi-fi and SLP/EP/trick play heads, so maybe that made it more tricky than e.g SLP playback on a PAL VHS deck with 4 video heads.

Is it a digital8 or analog LP tape? If it's the latter a sony hi8 w/ tbc may be just as good, there's hardly any difference TBC/DNR hi8 camcorders and digital8 with analog playback at least for PAL (other than on dropouts span many lines where the d8 and low end hi8 from the same series stop repeating lines after some limit unlike the earlier hi8 ones where they seem to repeat infinitely until there signal comes back).

I'm not sure as to what happened, do you know, I've never counted the heads!

The HiFi didn't require separate heads on the 8mm systems as the audio isn't depth multiplexed but the AFM system modulates the baseband audio onto a carrier between the Y&C signals. Fine for monoaural reproduction, perfectly adequate for stereo NTSC reproduction but on PAL the gap between Y&C (I don't have the data to hand, please accept this has a broad explanation) doesn't permit a full difference signal.

It uses L+R/L-R a la WFM broadcast, but the L-R is hampered on PAL by quite a bit. If I recall it even uses the same 19kHz pilot for recovering the suppressed L-R component. It allowed a full monoaural recovery of stereo tapes on a monoaural machine too as the suppressed carrier on the L-R component essentially makes it transparent to a monoaural machine.

Hence some PAL AFM stereo tapes sound a bit 'odd' on critical listening, it was good enough for camcorders but it wasn't especially good for reproducing at any great fidelity. That wasn't the purpose of it though.

The actual sound quality is good on AFM - it's a neat little system.

Where were we again?!

It´s an analog 8mm NTSC tape.

NTSC from PAL gear also tends to be the quasi format, not true NTSC. Verify.

Oh yeah, you are right. The camera actually outputs NTSC 4.43. I made a little mistake. Are there disadvantages considering the fact that the original NTSC tapes were recorded on a Sony Camcorder made for the Japanese Domestic Market and bought from Japan, because I heard that the Japanese used NTSC-J which is actually NTSC 4.43 if I am not wrong.

I thought Japan used normal NTSC (3.579645). The main difference was using 0 IRE for setup, not 7.5.

Yup, Japan uses same color frequency as US. NTSC 4.43 is a hybrid thing to output/input NTSC with color at the standard PAL frequency without needing a separate oscillator for the standard NTSC frequency.

Afaik PAL Sony Hi8/D8/DV camcorders output NTSC 4.43 or PAL60 (aka NTSC on PAL TV) selectable in the menu when playing NTSC tapes. TBC and DNR does not work on NTSC playback on the CCD.TRV65 at least, don't know for sure if it's the same on later models, haven't seen this noted in any of the manuals.

NTSC 4.43 should be otherwise identical to standard NTSC 3.58 provided the input device accepts it (it's just NTSC with color at a different frequency), PAL60 may be a very slight degradation since there is a NTSC->PAL color conversion (which at least in early equipment involved dropping every other line of chroma). Not sure how TBC-y stuff is handled if doing video8/hi8 analog playback->DV of a NTSC tape in PAL camera.

DV/D8 playback will output the straight DV stream so shouldn't be any difference there as long as the camcorder can play it back (which can be an issue with LP at least on DV bur prob on D8 as well, LP DV can be very fiddly in general).

The TBC actually seems to work very well. The tape originally had some dropouts and a lot of streaks (especially at the beginning and the end), but there's almost no errors when playing it on this camcorder with the TBC on.