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Posted by mv on 05/15/06 18:13
>
>John
>
>The wet vs dry tape lubricant is still regularly referred to as a possible
>issue for cameras. Is that another myth that has been busted? Are the
>tapes lubricants all the same now? What was the issue for mixing tapes with
>different lubricants? I've never seen thes problems but have seen many
>times stories of impending dread if one were to mix n match.
Specs
There certainly was a serious issue in the first months of DV in early
1997. The so called wet and dry lubricant types were fine until the
chemistry mixed, causing little concretised particles to form within the
tape transport system, resulting in several cases with total destruction
of the assembly. You can imagine the furore. Panasonic and Sony quickly
resolved the problem but there remained several thousand of the early
tapes in circulation. I'm not clear if the new formulations were
designed to be chemically inert with regards to both the old lubricants
but I suspect they were. Nevertheless there remained the potential
danger of old Sony and Panasonic tapes still infecting each other. It
was the original cause of our sticking with the same basic Panasonic
brand ever since, not because we thought they were any better but almost
a decade and thousands of tapes later, we've learned with absolute
surety that binary coding is particularly unchallenging to tape and ALL
the hype about coercively, retention, drop out integrity etc. etc., is
indeed mostly, if not all, hype. Very profitable hype too for the
manufacturers when one considers the absurdly high relative cost of so
called professional brands. Our Z1's and A1 are happily shooting HDV on
the same cheap tapes and mostly in rough environments, without any
glitches at all. So to all those 'taking themselves too seriously'
nerds, put that in your pipe and smoke it.
One last observation though is that I've noticed how completely
insensitive to the fragility of their equipment some folk are, even
professionals. They allow particles to contaminate the tape path by
needlessly leaving cassette loading doors open in, particularly in
exterior environments where the smallest air movement is carrying
sufficiently large particles that can cause all those drop outs they
then blame the tape for. Hen I work in harsher environments I extra seal
around the tape compartment door with half inch camera tape, the non
destructive adhesive type. The worst offenders also seem unable to gauge
where their cameras physical envelope ends and the rest of the world
begins. With the best will in the world these little DV and HDV cameras
have very small and fragile mechanics. I'm certain that many problems
that have been blamed on tape or other inherent weaknesses of equipment
are actually down to what really amounts to abuse of kit. Anyone who is
unable to take on board my own extreme operational care of kit on
location is utterly useless to me, no matter how great they might be in
other respects. People who leave a trail of broken or malfunctioning
equipment in their wake need to take up another profession and not take
their own cack handedness for a generality.
--
John Lubran
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