Hi,

Was wondering if anyone could help - I've just recently acquired an old Sony
CCD-V800 camcorder very cheaply, and was hoping there might be a way of
getting the VCR section sorted out, as the camera section works perfectly,
and it would be a shame to bin it without even trying to fix.

The problem is that when I play back pre-recorded Hi-8 tapes, all I get is
faint streaky lines on black background, and garbled, but intellegible
audio. Fast forward or rewind when playing shows a bit of the image. I
thought this might be dirty heads, but it refuses to play my head cleaning
casette, insisting it is ejected as soon as you put it in (only does this
with the cleaner).
I tried recording some stuff and playing it back with another Hi-8 cam,
which gave a half and half effect - top of the screen was the previous image
on the tape, and at the bottom you could see the new images i'd just
recorded, so it seems that something is going right, just that there is some
form of alignment problem maybe - I've read things about tape guides etc...
but I'm not sure what I'm looking for, although I would like to fix it
myself, it's not worth taking to a repair shop because of it's age and low
value etc.

If anyone's got any ideas, they'd be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

Tom