Seen this ugly message now twice in one week on a brand new camcorder. Cleaned the heads and three-quarters of the way through the second tape, I see the message again.

Am I looking at a faulty unit or is this something everyone sees?

Using Fuji mini dv tapes.

Since you're in Burbank and the cam is still under warranty, why not take it down to Canon Factory Service in Irvine and see what they have to say about it.

Are you leaving the camera in pause mode for extended periods of time. I've found that long periods of pause tend to cause the dirty head message. Sometimes, just going to lock and back up to pause and record cleans the heads of the residue built up during the pause. But for weddings, I go ahead and put the cleaning tape in for 10 seconds just to be on the safe side.

Try avoiding long pauses. Either shoot a six second shot every minute or so, or go down to lock.

Now Mike! That makes a lot of sense! . . First time I've read that . .excellent advise . .. excelllent!

Grazie

I've shot 70-80 hours of video with a promiscuous mix of Sony, Panasonic and Fuji tapes, with more reuse of tapes than is advisable, and have never had to clean the heads.

This strongly implies to me that Georg's cam is defective.

What kind of shooting do you do? My GL2 get used for weddings. The ceremony portion involves a long segment of footage. But the rest of a wedding shoot is "shoot, pause, shoot". Many of the clips are only 6 to 10 seconds long, for example, at the reception--with long periods of pause inbetween. And for that reason I kind of expect to clean the heads more often.

Maybe someone who shoots only long segments of footage need not clean the heads. I've read that the tape tends to clean the heads. In fact, I've got a Canon ZR50mc single chip camera which gave me a dirty head message. I immediately put in a brand new tape (I always use Panasonic MQ tapes). The first 10 minutes of the tape was mosaic from dirty heads. Then it cleared up. So I take this as experience showing that simply playing a tape through a camera will clean the heads (assuming they are not too dirty?). Then I leap to the conclusion that long periods of recording will generally keep heads clean. But short periods of recording will contribute to dirty heads.

Just my take based only on my experience.

Mike, all my shooting is pretty much non-stop as I tape plays and musicals. So that fits in with your theory.

2 weeks ago i become a message: head dirty, use cleaning cassette.
OK, i buy one, and play it about 20sec. (the manual says 30sec)

I always use TDK tapes, and not mix different brands.

Yesterday the message appear again. Why?
Wasn't enough the 20sec cleaning?
Should i use it again?

thx