VHS Camera Recording Black and White

[analog_addict]

Hello all,

I'm preparing to shoot a short on VHS, the problem is my camera (Panasonic M10) is recording in black and white.

It has recorded in colour before but now it seems to be B&W only. I've tested via a SCART VHS player and RCA PC capture card. The footage is definitely being recorded in B&W onto the actual tape and not a playback issue.

Does anyone have any ideas why a VHS camera might do this? Could be be dirty heads or part of the tape not engaging correctly?

Thanks!

 

[Paul F]

It's highly unlikely that it is a transport issue. The signal recorded on tape is the composite video which has both the color and luminance in one recorded track. So if you are getting a black and white picture, the head and transport are ok. The color signal is either not getting recorded (this would not be a dirty head or transport issue) or it is not being played back.

 

[Greg_E]

Normally I would say a clogged chroma head on the drum... these don't have separate heads for the chroma signal. But first thing I would look at is cleaning the heads. Next would be to clean the brushes that send the voltages to the heads and see if the brushes and slip rings are clean (if it has brushes and rings, could be inductive). After that I would buy a used camera that works, not really worth doing a lot of repair work on something like this (my opinion).

If you really want to tinker, you'll want to go through from the front end all the way to the waveform on the heads to find the problems. Could be a bad trimmer pot on a chroma circuit and a nudge will make it work again. But it could be down to a bad RF section sending a weak signal to the heads. You'll need a oscope, test tape, and really a service book. Need at least a 20mhz scope, 50-60mhz would be better for some of the RF stuff, and you'll probably need 2 channels with a trigger input.