How to Clean Your Mini DV Camera

"Hi! This is Bobby Hester on behalf of expertvillage.com. In this next clip, I’m going to demonstrate how to clean a mini DV camcorder. Most mini DV camcorders, when you purchase them, come with a cleaning cassette already. This is a Sony brand, and it came with a Sony cleaner. I’ll suggest that if your camera did not come with a cleaner, that you would buy a cleaner made by the manufacturer of your camera. To use the cleaner, you just open the cassette. I’ll insert my cleaning tape. The mini DV cleaning tapes don’t require any kind of cleaning solution. They just have a slight abrasiveness to the tape. It’s very important that you only do this when it’s necessary. If you are noticing that your camera is starting malfunction, and you have got a lot of pixilation in your image, that’s when you need to clean it. It’s not something that you need clean every week or anything like that. Just whenever absolutely necessary. You put your tape in and put it on VCR. And you just hit play for about 10 seconds. Let that roll, hit stop, and that’s all that you need. You don’t want to run it any longer than that. If you repeatedly use this cleaning tape, it can eventually damage the heads on your camera. It’s very important to only run it about 10 seconds. That’s how to clean the heads on a mini DV camcorder."