Rayski wrote:
Hi,

I hope someone there can help me get this camcorder going again so that
we can retrieve important content.

Having a Viewcam VL-E37X which is seriously munted, I thought that
perhaps somone may be able to give me a heads up.

The Viewcam was bought new several years ago, it hasn't been dropped
or disassembled. All tapes were recorded on this Viewcam and had been
working perfectly previously.

We were planning on capturing our old video8 footage of kids (births,
birthdays, etc.) to archive on DVD, I took the unit out of its box
after a few years of not being touched. The batteries are shot (no
surprises there) so put the battery eliminator in.

1st tape plays OK, then further in starts to get horizontal tearing,
going to B&W, distortion of audio and generally is not much use. I
noted that where the tearing is, if you FF preview (press play, then
FF) the image looks normal apart from the usual bands of noise seen
when FF preview is used.

Some tapes once loaded will get the message 'eject cassette' as
soon as you press Play/FF/Rew. I have found that by removing the tape,
manually winding it around a little and re-inserting, this problem
ceases to occur.

It seems that perhaps the head is out of alignment or has sync issues,
but this should be consistent across all tapes and the whole of the
cassette.

Your advice will be gratefully appreciated,

Ray

If your tapes have been sitting around a long time fast forward them and
rewind them and try to play them. this not only excersizes the tape but
the cams mech we do this all the time copying home vids for people