I have assembled quite a few USENET comments from various people on the question of short-lived DV heads and tape contaminants here: http://www.best.com/~beale/trv900/head.txt but the most recent word seems to be, that Sony had an incompatible lubricant on their DV stock that they changed sometime in 1997 to be compatible with "everyone else", and the problem has disappeared as a result. This is according to Panasonic tech support. I personally haven't had a problem.(posted 9213 days ago)