Hey guys,
Years ago I turned to this forum for help and several of you were instrumental on setting me on the right path for digitizing video tapes the correct way. Because of you, my quality of reproduction has improved significantly. Much thanks to you.
Unfortunately, I'm having problems with my Panasonic AG-1980 Pro, so I thought I would turn to this helpful forum again and see if anyone can offer advice.
I bought my first AG-1980 Pro back in 2012/2013 and it was working great from the get go. Lucky me.
The quality started to falter sometime in the following year so I sent it off to Jots Electronics for repair. They replaced a bunch of capacitors and the machine was good as gold again.
A year and a half later and the machine experienced a tape jam and never really recovered after that.
I picked up another AG-1980 Pro sometime in Dec/Jan and, lucky me again, it was working great.
Last week though, the quality suddenly plummeted.
I've got these wavy-colourful-bandy lines running thru the image. Sometimes if I let the tape run for 30 min, rewind and play again, they disappear, but even that doesn't seem to be temporarily fixing the issue anymore. Also, when the TBC is engaged, the blacks get really, really plugged in. I've attached images so you can see what I mean. (I boosted the contrast of each image so the lines would be more noticeable on screen)
These issues are the exact same things that happened to my first AG-1980 before sending it off to Jots. They cropped up again during the tape jamming fiasco. Unfortunately, Jots was unable to fix the issue after resolving the tape jam, even after trying every solution they could think of (and
not charging me… great guys over there!)
Now that I'm experiencing the same issues with this second machine, I've recalled something that might be important: the wavy-colourful-bandy lines started showing up immediately after returning to work and noticing that a power failure had happened to the store the night before.
All of my units are hooked up to power bars with working surge protection and none of them have been affected negatively in the past by power failures… except the AG-1980. I'm wondering if the AG-1980 Pro just doesn't react well to power failures. No clue though. Just hypothesizing here.
I've already replaced the internal power supply of the AG-1980 in an attempt to fix the problem, but no such luck. I had an extra laying around so I thought it was worth a try.
Has anyone experienced this problem before?
And if the problem is the result of a power failure in the building upsetting the machine, what's a good way to guard against it? Maybe unplugging the machine from the power source when I'm not using it?
Also, any recommendations on the best way proceed with this machine would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!