[blakew]

Sorry if i'm doing anything wrong, but i thought this would be the right place to ask.

I bought the above model on ebay. The owner said they had no use for it anymore, and that it didn't work properly. It is similar to another video camera we already had.

My problem is that playback looks pretty awful, even on videos that i know look good. the frustrating thing is that you can pause it and it looks fine. i checked the alignment of the tape mechanism, but that can't be the problem. it appears that there is a loss of horizontal sync on the video signal. I'm guessing it would probably be a bad capacitor, as people have said that many of the sony camcorders from around that age have a lot of faulty capacitors.

also, sometimes when you fast forward the video, for a few seconds it looks completely fine (but at a lower frame rate), then the image moves down a little horizontally and begins to look terrible.

I tried using a digital effect "flash" and it appears that it's an image stability problem.

i don't know what to do next. i've tried cleaning the pinch roller (although the capstan does look a little dirty, i might try cleaning it too).

I also demagnetized the heads at least twice.

any help would be greatly appreciated.