Used and Recycled Mini DV tapes?

[Bryson]

Has anyone got any experience with buying recycled (ie cleaned and erased) mini DV tapes? I have to keep a stock of Mini DV tapes for our camera stock, and I always end up having to give them away (everyone's got a damn good reason why they can't buy their own.... ;) ) so I was looking at the attractive price point of these tapes. I'm looking at them on this page.

 

Opinions? Total waste of time, or prudent purchasing for low-criticality applications?

[MarkPAman]

I've had too many drop outs from re-used tapes. Even for non critical stuff it's still very annoying. Don't do it.

[peternewman]

We've always got all our tapes from www.tapestock.co.uk, always been great service and they seem to be cheaper than those used ones, at least for basic Sony Mini DV. However being a student TV station, we don't have the budget to have a new tape each time, so reuse them quite a lot, until they mysteriously disappear as they all seem to (we should have over 500 tapes, we don't). Anyway they seem to be fine when reused, we used to blank them before use, but currently don't, which perhaps gives a few more timecode break issues. But I guess we comfortably get 5 reuses at least, although some of our issues are dodgy heads in the cameras etc. Obviously we're not mission critical and can afford to loose a show/put something with artifacts up, so YMMV.