I've encountered this exact problem a month ago, except cleaning the heads did not fix it. However, I was able to find an alternative solution...
After leaving my camera closed up in a drawer for a few weeks, I decided to take it out and leave it in the sun for 15 minutes, assuming that perhaps the gray bars were a result of moisture damage. The next day (Today, to be exact) I turned my camcorder on, and the gray bars have gone away from playback, as well as the reduced sound quallity it caused.
I looked up this problem on some other sites and they all suggested a dirty drum or dirty heads. I ran a cleaning tape (available at any Best Buy/Circuit City) through it and now every thing's working fine. Hopefully everyone who had a similar problem can solve it the same way.
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I'm having the same problem. It worked fine for 4 months and now poof!
I am having the same problem as well - horizonal bars across the screen during playback that don't show up during recording. The bars go away after a minute or two.
I turned on my camera the other day to capture some footage I had shot with another camera and had a similar issue. For part of the time, though, the camera actually didn't even find a timecode on the tape. It was only after I fast-forwarded to about 10 mminutes in that it found the time code, but only with the grey bars. I tried a different tape and it had the bars, too. The good news is that these bars are not on the actual tape, because I have since played the same tapes back in other cameras and had no issue. I can't seem to figure out what it is, and I'm hoping it just needs a cleaning tape or something run through it. Has anyone tried this? It seems strange to me that so many people are popping up with this issue all at once. I'm had mine since January or February '07 when it first came out, and this is the first problem I've had with it.
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