Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Lots of useful information and opinions online about using the 1980. There aren't really that many settings; it's pretty easy to use. The good thing about the 1980 is that it is pretty conservative with its noise reduction. So you don't have to feel guilty about using some of its features.

Yes there are built-in head cleaners, but I opened it up and saw them - they didn't really impress me. I find it hard to believe that they would actually clean the heads. Personally, I'm so used to cleaning video heads myself that I feel more comfortable doing it than having someone else (or a machine) do it. I guess it's because I work with all those old reel-to-reel formats that come from the "sticky-shed" era where you have to bake tapes and clean the heads even just halfway through a tape. It's really not that hard if you're a careful, detail-oriented type of person. Don't use Q-tips.

I did head cleaning the old fashioned way on some Umatic decks back in college. You had to "pop the hood". We had a special spray and cleaning cloths made for the task.

By way of comparison, I did have some build up on the head of my AG-1970 that caused some minor picture distortion until I used a cleaning tape as a last resort. I think some tapes I got in a trade were the cause of that though. I don't think I've ever had any real head problems with either 1980 I've owned.

One thing in our favor is 70's and 80's videotape were made to much higher standards. Things went downhill in the 90's in terms of quality.