Sony DSR-1800 professional DVCAM deck

Here's a professional DVCAM deck at the school. It was donated to the school by Cut It Out Productions. (there's a label on top of it) We use it to dub MiniDV tapes through S-Video to a JVC SR-DVM600 DVD recorder. The DVD-RWs will then be copied to hard drives and imported into NLEs. If you ask my why don't we just use the MiniDV deck built into the SR-DVM600, it's because the built in deck is broken and eats tapes.

This deck accepts DVCAM-L, DVCPRO-M and Mini DV tapes. It plays tapes recorded in DVCAM and MiniDV SP formats and records only in DVCAM format. (It records DVCAM on MiniDV. "MiniDVCAM" can be played on some consumer camcorders.) An LP indicator lights up when MiniDV LP is detected but it doesn't read MiniDV LP properly. The picture is full of errors/pixelation and is unusable. There is no picture quality difference between the different sized tapes. The only difference is play time. We never tried playing a larger tape because we don't have any.

The dial on the right of the deck is a dual function jog/shuttle commonly found on professional tape decks. You can switch between jog mode and shuttle (variable-speed play) mode by pushing it. In jog mode, the dial controls how many frames to advance (kind of like frame-by-frame but more intuitive). In shuttle mode, it controls the playback speed, from full speed reverse (same as the rewind button) to full speed forward (same as the ff button). In physics terms, the jog mode controls displacement and the shuttle mode controls velocity.

The deck has component in/out, s-video in/out, composite in/out, 4-ch XLR audio in/out and a 1394 port for DV in/out. It also has a second video output with OSD for monitoring, a mono monitor audio out and a RS-422 remote control port. We never used the remote control because we don't have the l33t gear to do remote.

A nifty feature it has is the channel condition indicator. It shows how much error correction needs to be done to produce an error-free output. IMO it's a great way to tell when to back up the tapes.