[fastpuma]

hi folks i just got my first camcorder (sony dcr pc 106) quite a dated model, but anyway i just had it for one week and it was playing up on me! first the recordings that i was making was terrible the playback on it was unwatchable! it was all blocky as if it was i was watching some bad quality pirate dvd! secondly the program that came with it (picture package) didnt work i was suppose to use my recordings and edit them using the software, so i sent it back to the retailer and they sent it to sony now its about 3 weeks still no sign of my camcorder back! and im going to china in 6days time..sigh* the retailers did mention i should be sticking to sony mini dv tapes rather than any other brands thus making me feel and look stupid as i was told by upteen high st retailers that any brand would be fine. any body tell me if they had the same problems as me? and what they did, apart from chucking the camcorder across the room! ta much for reading this.

[BadAss]

Any brand should be fine and not give you the problems you descibe. I started using Sony tapes to begin with but I last used JVC because they were on offer at the time.

The difference between tapes will be the durabilty not PQ. This means Sony might be of better quality material thus giving less errors over many play backs. Its down to you, how much you want to spend and what you believe the best make of tape to be. But no tape should give you so many errors that you cant see whats been recorded. I've seen errors (small blocks, very rarely) on Sony tapes too, so Sonys aren't emune. It sounds like the camera is faulty and the heads are miss aligned though this is only a guess, digital artifacts could be caused by allmost anything.

[MarkE19]

I agree that all branded DV tapes should be good enough to use on any DV camcorder. However I would strongly advise you to stick to a single make of tape as they all have different coatings. If useing a mix of tape the coatings can mix on the heads of your cam and clogg it up - and give results similar to you are getting, resulting in an expensive repair.

Mark.