Has anyone found a solution to this... I am shooting mini-dv with the xl1s and trying to playback on a sony dsr40.... the pitch or something is not right for I can not seem to make it work... HELP!!!!

The tape from the XL1 is in DV format and the DSR-40 is DVCAM format... sounds like the deck is trying to read the tape as a DVCAM format tape. I thought the DSR-40 would play back a DV cassette. Maybe it's a menu setting? There's a DV / DVCAM indicator on the deck's front panel.

I have looked but am not finding anything in the menu that will do this,... if anyone is familiar with this menu setting,please tell me.

Yet another twist to "as the video head world turns"... Canon tells me that the sony deck "will" play the mini-dv if it is shot in SP mode ( I did this and it still does not work)... Sony says I must realign the pitch on the machine, thus running the risk of previous recorded dvcam tapes not playing properly.... looks like I may be buying a new dvcam back for my studio camera unless someone has a better remedy to my dilemma.

Can you copy the original XL1 tape to DVCam via fireWire (iLink)? Then playback from the DSR-40. It will take longer but it is a work around if you don't want to use the XL1 for playback. As to a solution, it sounds as if the DSR-40 has a tape path alignment problem (could be the XL1, or both). The unit can be sent in for alignment (kind of like a front end alignment on a car). However, once aligned, it will not be able to playback tapes previously record on it. The solution is to copy all the old tapes to a machine that is known to have good alignment. After they are all copied, have the machine aligned.

Jeff

Thanks for the suggestion,... this is exactly what I am doing, my desire is to limit head use on the XL1...