How to learn the hour count of head wear?
 

Hello,

I purchased my Blaupunkt RTV-950 (clone of Panasonic NV-FS200) from E-Bay.de. The seller told me that the VCR is of little use and I trust people. It was sold as defective (does not switch on) and was repaired by a high grade electronics master. The master and I myself inspected the unit and it did not show traces of heavy use.
Now when I have tested it and compared to my other VCRs, two HiFi machines:
LG- LV 880, Sony SLV SE-630, and a simple LG BL-162W I have noticed that the Blaupunkt has possibly the largest amount of defects when playing damaged parts of tape. This is regardless of TBC On/Off and Noise Filter On/Off. And the same while playback to TV or capturing.
Now I am starting to wonder if the heads are worn more on Blaupunkt? Maybe someone knows if it is possible to find out the working hours for the head drum of Blaupunkt (Panasonic NV-FS200)? Maybe the service manual can help for this? Or can the electronics be at fault. I myself think that no.
I have attached 2 captures with Blaupunkt and LG LV880 to demonstrate this.

Maris

The rolling lines are called dropouts and the difference you're seeing is partly in the effectiveness of the Drop-Out Compensation (DOC) circuitry. Most likely this is a difference in electronic design: not a fault with your particular FS200 but rather the performance you'd see with most FS200 units.

When the FS200 spits out all those grey lines, this is the true appearance of a dropout as read by the head and decoded into a video signal: the DOC has decided to output the image as-is rather than employ correction. The lines that just look like digitally-glitched versions of the frame, on the other hand, have had these grey lines replaced by the DOC doing its job duplicating previous line(s).

The tape itself is what's screwed; a highly-sensitive head could potentially read (let's say for example) 80% of the information instead of 75% read by a worse head, but that still leaves a lot of work either way for the DOC.

But the reason the DOC'd lines output by the FS200 appear skewed is because you're capturing with a Canopus. Previously I've only seen this error demonstrated with regard to the ADVC-300, but I guess it's common across their range.

Thank you for the thorough explanation! Sadly I am not so expierenced to see what you see. :) From what you told I would say that the dropouts are white lines, not grey? How do you recognize which are the lines replaced by DOC ? I don't know how to recognize them.
It has nothing to do with Canopus. I captured with a Sony miniDV camcoder throughpass. And the dropouts were exactly the same when watching the cassette on TV from all VCRs.
From what you told I must make a conclusion that the DOC circuitry in the Blaupunkt is worse than in my all 3 other VCRs? Even worse than in a basic LG BL-162W VCR player. Maybe they have newer circuitry?

Can you please tell me if the screenshot I have attached is what has dropout lines.

Your screenshots are showing dropouts uncorrected by the DOC, as described in paragraph 2 in my post above. Corrected dropouts look different.

White-grey-black interspersed, if you wanna get technical.

I don't think you understood what I was describing there. Please post a FS200 -> Sony capture of this section.

I should say, dropouts always mean that the head failed to pick up a solid RF signal from the tape. But this low RF level can also be caused my poor tracking. You could try recapturing that section on the FS200 several times, with different manual tracking adjustments.

These are Blaupunkt RTV-950 > Sony miniDV and LG LV-880 > Sony miniDV captures I posted. I did not use Canopus here. And as I said I noticed the same dropouts at exactly the same places while watching this tape on my LCD TV.
The Blaupunkt had a blown out Power supply and some more blown out electronic parts when purchased. The master was a high grade electronics master. But I guess he can't know if every electronic feature of this VCR works properly. Maybe the DOC circuitry is not working too? I will play with the Manual Tracking control more as well allthough as long as I remember I allready tried to obtain less dropouts with Tracking. May be the head drum needs an alignment procedure if there is such? When one purchases one of the best gear possible he expects to get the best performance. This may not be the case with used gear though. So I too need to know if my Blaupunkt is at fault or not. :)

Oh. Intriguing.

What's the point of your signature if not to describe your workflow? "Maris. Windows 7 64 Bit, Sony Vegas Pro 12, Canopus ADVC 110"

Again, I don't think you understood my point. I wasn't talking about the placement of the dropouts at all but rather an added horizontal distortion.

I use different workflows and the signature allowing just 1 line does not allow me to name all my equipment. :)

You should have the ability to make 2-3 lines, each with a sentence of text.
Try it.

If not working, make a post about signature length on General Discussion, and we'll look into it.

This is what I receive when trying to edit my signature and write more than 1 line:
The following errors occurred with your submission:
1. Your signature contains too many lines and must be shortened. You may only have up to 1 line(s). Long text may have been implicitly wrapped, causing it to be counted as multiple lines.

Can you post a FS200 -> Canopus sample of the same section?

OK, I will make this capture ASAP.