Sony EVO-9650 output problem
 

Hey guys, I have a Sony Evo-9650 Hi8 deck and I’m planning to digitize a pile of tapes for a documentary. I’m having a strange issue, if I send a single through BNC to an old Sony Trinitron monitor it sends a beautiful image. However, if I send it to any converter or capture device, it’s says no signal. I’ve tried my normal Blackmagic Analog-SDI converters, both BNc and s-video. I’ve tried to send it to a separate VCRs input, but no signal. The only thing that will receive the feed is the old Sony monitor. Any ideas? I’m going crazy!

Have you tried it with another ordinary TV?

It is generally recommended to use a Hi8 or Digital8 camcorder which is much more likely to have fewer hours on the heads and they have a lot fewer caps that could have gone bad (most of the recommended camcorder units have something like 4 electrolytic capacitors total). You should also only be using S-Video out for the digitization part. Most camcorders probably have had fewer than 30 tapes ever through them for home use, whereas the fancier standalone decks were more likely to have been more heavily used in non-home environments, or even if they were used in a home environment, they could have been used for things like recording countless hours of TV or the like.

As for why it plays on the trinitron CRT, those are much more tolerant of timebase errors, Usually if a professional deck has a TBC in it, there will be a switch or button on the outside to enable, so I'm guessing the EVO-9650 doesn't have one.

If you do pick up a Hi8/Digital8 camcorder, make sure it is one that does have a TBC (not all of them do) and if it's a Digital8 player that it can play Video8/Hi8 tapes (not all of them do). You'd want to verify that in the owners manual PDFs online, or there's suggested machine lists on this site. You probably also want a unit that has stereo audio out, which from memory means you don't want one that ends in a part number of "8" from Sony in most cases.