“I have a camcorder that I play my tapes on but all I get is the sound and the picture is distorted. What can I do to get this fix?”
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There could be many reasons for distorted picture on your camcorder. Cleaning the camcorder may help but if not maybe the tapes themselves have become damaged
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.Clean the camcorders heads. Surely your owner's manual would have mentioned the necessity of cleaning it. Magnetic tapes shed particles onto the parts of the camcorder that the tape comes in contact with. As it accumulates (especially on the heads), it degrades recording and playback performance. Get some isopropanol (you can buy 91% isopropyl alcohol at drug stores) and some foam tipped swabs. In principle you could use standard cotton swabs (Q-tips), but larger foam tipped swabs would be better. I don't know what particular camcorder model you have, but you'll need to be able to access the heads and actually any parts that the tape comes into contact with. Make a swab "wet" with the isopropanol and scrub all the relevant parts. Use as many swabs as necessary and if your camcorder has a drum shaped head, it's possible you may have difficulting accessing the entire circumference, so you may need to turn on the camcorder and get the drum to spin a bit so you can access and clean all the way around it. Alternatively you could buy a special cleaning "cassette" that has the same case type as whatever type of tapes your camcorder uses. Instead of magnetic tape, it will have a special cleaning ribbon and these typically come with isopropanyl or a similar cleaning fluid that you dispense a small amount into the cleaning cassette at a designated port. Then you just play it for a short period (typically 10 to 30 seconds). However, the manual method with swabs should be more effective, especially if you've used the camcorder a lot and have never cleaned it before.
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