In fact it now does bars in playback on a tape which worked fine 10 minutes ago ! And I didn't drop it in the mean time. It has done this before at the start of a tape but always cleared up after a while.
this is my 2nd camcorder and the 2nd one to develop horizontal bars in playback. Is this head alignment? Can I take it to an av shop to have it repaired? Canon told me it was not worth it to repair theirs after my using it less than 5 hours. This time it's a Panasonic PV GS 320. I've gotten more hours out of this but I can't buy a new camcorder every 6 months because this happens in all of them.
I started downloading this tape last week and it was fine. Now half the screen is horizontal blue bars

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