Where Can I Find Help on Repairing my Sony EV-S2000 8mm/hi8 VCR?

[audioresearch]

Where Can I Find Help on Repairing my Sony EV-S2000 8mm/hi8 VCR?

From about 25 minutes into playing one hour 8mm tapes, it plays fine. But before that run time, every so often the picture jumps and the audio cuts out.

I removed the tape transport and looked at it & found something that appears to adjust the tension on the supply reel however adjusting that never helped. The back tension pad looks to my eye to be ok for whatever that is worth.

I just assumed the problem is a tape back-tension but I'm not positive it is.

Thanks very much for any help.

[october262]

do the picture jumps and the audio cuts out happen on all tapes
or just certain ones ?? sounds like a bad tape.

[audioresearch]

All tapes and I've tried at least a dozen from my 8mm video library.

[dellsam34]

No one knows where you live, so how can you expect us to show you the nearest repair shop to you ??? Besides, It would cost you more to repair it than just buy another used one.

[audioresearch]

Let me clarify.

I would like to try to fix my Sony EV-S2000 8mm/hi8 deck myself and to help with that, I'm trying to find people who are very familiar with repairing this unit or substantially similar units some questions and get some guidance. It's my hope that my problem is a common well known problem and an experienced repairman could tell me what the problem most likely is and how to fix it if it is something fairly easy that I could do myself without needing specialized equipment.

However, if you might happen to know where I could buy either a camcorder or vcr deck that would play back 8mm video with high quality and that doesn't cost a fortune, please by all means suggest where I should look. Any recommendations for camcorders or decks that have particularly high playback quality compared to average equipment (if there are any) would be very much appreciated. I only care about 8mm video tape playback quality because my project is solely to convert existing 8mm video tapes to digital files to be archived on hard drive.

A lot of sellers on Ebay are asking around $400 to $500 for Sony EV-S2000 decks which I consider to be an unacceptably high price for something that is used, really old, obsolete, and is something I would have no long term use for.

I shot all the 8mm video using a Sony CCD-TR700 8mm/hi8 camcorder which failed and so I no longer have it.

What I do remember from about 10 to 15 years ago is that I played back some of these videos on my Sony EV-S2000 deck and also on my Sony DCR-TR7000 D8 camcorder and I could see more video noise in the picture when using the Sony D8 camcorder. It wasn't bad enough to make the video unwatchable, but I did not have to strain to notice the noise. Have you had similar experience where you have found the overall video quality of a D8 camera playing back 8mm video to be noticeably worse than when actual 8mm equipment played it back?

I just got the free version of Davinci Resolve. Do you believe there is a decent chance that it has noise reduction that might eliminate such video noise?

[dellsam34]

You would not get any better quality from a deck than from a good D8/Hi8 camcorder with built line TBC, DNR and S-Video output (not any camcorder), Such home decks were made for accurate editing which no one does nowadays, The price for those decks is mostly sentimental now and maybe the looks. Yes good camcorders are slightly expensive but they are nowhere near the price of a home deck.

[audioresearch]

I'm going to answer my own question to help anyone else who might find these postings.

The problem indeed was bad 8mm tapes. My vcr is fine so far as I know.

The tapes had "sticky shed" problem where they stick to themselves and if played or fast forwarded or rewound, because of that problem the tape snaps.

I took apart the cassettes and by hand slowly fast forwarded the tapes manually holding one tape reel in my hand and letting gravity feed out the tape so it spilled out on the floor. If the tape stuck to itself there was not enough force from gravity for the tape to snap. The tape would start winding back over itself on the reel and so I stopped the reel from spinning in my hand and I very, very, very carefully used an exacto knife razor blade and put it between the outer layer of tape and the layer just inside it where they were stuck together and cut the stuck-together part apart.

This was extremely time consuming, about 2 hours per tape.

I put the tape reel that contained the tape (ie, NOT the takeup reel) on a smooth counter top, stuck a small phillips screwdriver in the dimple in the center of the tape so the tape would rotate on the screwdriver when I gave the outside of the reel a very gentle shove with my fingers to make it rotate. I let the tape slide off the counter and fall on the floor which I kept clean.

Before that, I had tried "baking" the tapes and that was totally useless. Baking seems to work for some other types of tape, but not for these 8mm tapes since the way they fail is different from, say, most reel-to-reel audio tapes.

I called one of the best known and most reputable services that fixes these type of old tape problems and they confirmed my method was essentially the same way that they restored tapes.

My tapes played back fairly well. Good enough where I could easily see my 30+ year old camcorder videos. There were small "hits" in the picture every so often, but they were not bad enough to make things unwatchable. Maybe every 8 seconds or so, the picture jumped a little-it did not roll vertically off the screen or anything really bad.