I recently got a Sony DSR-250, and it worked fine until the second time I used it for heir. After I was finished recording, I switched the camera to VTR and pressed rewind. At this point everything seemed fine, until I pressed the eject button. I was shooting a MiniDV tape so the tape was in the Mini holder. As the tape holder lifted the tape up there was a strange crinkling noise, and the tape stooped half way up and then began to go back down. Once it was all the way down it then started to eject again, only to come to stop about half way up and then go back down again. The third time it finally managed to eject, and I removed it to find a piece of wrinkled and broken tape sticking out the side.

Anyway, what happened and what did I do wrong? I’ve been using nothing but Sony tapes. The camera only has a tape run of 10 hours. Though, the heads had not been cleaned up to that point, looking back at it that probably wasn’t a good idea. I have not been able to duplicate the problem, but would greatly appreciate any advice on preventing it from happening in the future.

Are you sure you were recording in the DV mode and not the DVCAM mode? That's all I can think of.

Not a head problem. In fact, cleaning heads this early in the camera's life would just waste head life.

I wouldn't normally press the eject button when the tape is running but the camera shouldn't have problems with that in any case. It has logic to prevent the problem you describe.

So unless the camera is old in years, just young in run-time, and the problem is sticky lube on the cassette handling arms, I'd just chalk it up to a one-time error. If it occurs again, then that's the time to send it in.

Recording in DV or DVCam has nothing to do with this type of problem.

It was in DV mode. Maybe it was just a bad tape, but it is certainly an experience that I don’t want to repeat again. I've tried to get the camera to do it again, but have had no problems.

It just seemed very odd that I got the camera new about a month ago from B&H, and the second time I use it for real I get a tape breaking. Then of course I'm flustered and forget about cleaning the heads, and the next thing I shoot has vertical bars and bad sound on it. I assume that this was caused by debris from the tape breaking, since it was fixed by running a Sony MiniDV Cleaning tape through it.

Edit:
Is there anyway to slice a MiniDV tape back together, or is it trash?