Signs of VCR head wear?
 

What is/are the sign(s) of video head wear? Though I imagine this applies to all formats, I'm specifically asking with S-VHS/VHS in mind.

Is it loss of picture detail or is it the introduction of video noise? I've seen both symptoms reported, but I honestly don't know which is correct? (I hate the idea putting the blame for a symptom on the WRONG cause.) I can fill in more of what my OWN observations are after I get some response. I don't want to bias anyone by my own suspicions and experience.

Snowy pictures is the sign but a snowy picture can also be other things like alignment issue or AC head issue mainly, so you'd need a trained eye and the gear to verify

1. That pic to me looked more like a tracking error. When I think of snow, I think of grain everywhere, and the grains are not horizontal streaks, just random dots densely everywhere.
2. Are you saying that loss of detail is NOT a sign of head wear? If not, then what is loss of detail a sign of??

One of the signs of head wear is noise in a form of grains, small to big depends on how bad it is, Noise from head wear fills the entire screen not just part of it because each head scans the entire image raster albeit every other scan line but a field is still considered a temporal frame. In addition to noise, severe head wear affects image timing signals and HiFi audio as well.

But does it EVER cause loss of detail on otherwise VERY CLEAN looking images?? My 90s history was using many VCRs constantly, doing a lot of editing, but also lots of (wasteful) TV show recording and editing. Every deck, whether industrial SVHS (AG-1970) or consumer (I had 7 in a duplication rig) got over-used, perhaps over-cleaned (I was terrified of head clog), and eventually the playback images started looking more in the direction of cartoon characters; that pastey look where you may have okay edges, but much less detail within the edges. I had believed this was head wear, but I realize I could have been wrong. I was totally ignorant of the fact that some electronic components can gradually perform worse over time.

Aging electronics in the video boards may affect the sharpness of the image not the head wear, Video is modulated into high frequency RF signal, The heads read the RF, Kind of like digital or FM, when the modulated raw signal is weak it produces noise.

Slightly dirty heads or too weak tape backtension can create a similar effect.

Then the horizontal slots cut into the video drum are there to prevent the tape "floating" and need to be kept clean to allow trapped air to escape to let the tape run truly on the drum and against the heads. So those slots need to be kept clean as well. Cleaning tapes are unlikely to fix this on their own. It's usually a manual job.

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. So important to good transfers.

it's taken from a video of 12voltvids (who repair vcr's on a daily) specifically talking about this .In the video he's not 100% sure himself but i trust his expertise.

One classic sign of video head wear on playback is black after white streaking where there are narrow black horizontal streaks
immediately to the right of peak white objects in the scene and gradually gets worse over time.