Video Camera Cleaning

Bought a JVC Digital Video camera (uses the mini-DV tapes) about a year ago. The picture still looks great, but the sound is getting distorted. What's the best method (other than paying someone $45 to tell me it needs cleaned and then $30 for them to clean it) to clean the tape path? I recall those dry VCR cleaning tapes were trashed as doing more harm than good back in the day. What about now? I considered lint free swabs and special cleaning fluid that I have that won't damage rubber parts, but wanted to check here with the experts...
Thanks,
Doug Hess, Jr.

 

Doug, miniDV (and 8mm, if you've seen them) cleaning tapes look like a standard tape, I'm not sure how they clean. Perhaps the tape surface is just more abrasive, but to the eye, it just looks like tape. I suppose they work, I've used one, but just for occasional maintenance, not problem solving. I'd think the video would show if the problem was a dirty head, perhaps there's an electronic problem. I imagine manual cleaning of those teeny cameras is no less a pain in the ass as cleaning any other size camcorder that way. It would be more effective,however, if things were really gunked up in there.

 

Recently I was having a problem with my Sony TRV900 MiniDV camera, which was having severe audio dropouts and a noisy picture (mosaic-pattern). So I went out and bought a head cleaning cassette (Sony DVM12CL) which my user manual recommended and it seemed to do the trick.

Now the instructions that came with the tape does say to run it no longer than 10 seconds, so I'm assuming it could do some harm running it longer.

 

I'd be suspicious of the distorted sound and acceptable picture. The digital audio is multiplexed in with the video signal, so it would be hard to imagine dirt affecting one but not the other.

Try popping a head cleaning tape into it - I've used them a couple of times - they've helped the problem and didn't seem to cause any damage (coincidentally, two JVC miniDV tapes I had used made the heads REALLY dirty, resulting in tons of dropout). If the problem's still there, take it to a repair center. The internal mechanisms are SOOOO tiny that you and I can cause an awful lot of harm messing around with them.