The point is Marco that I suspect we might be talking at cross purposes, as my explanation of what I am sure your camcorder suffers from i.e:- the lens cap defect caused by a defective image sensor doesnt actually affect any tapes taken from a time before the CCD went faulty, as it only affects what you have tried to take recently and will resulting in a blue screen or whatever as nothing has actually been recorded, of course the positive proof of the lens cap fault being that nothing shows on the LCD when the camcorder is pointing at something ready to shoot some video. Now "if" you cannot play tapes from some "previous" time and not recently taken then this could be caused by a really contaminated video head which will require "wet" cleaning (cassette cleaners not really good enough) as the lens cap fault does not affect playing back old tapes. Info on this though can be sent to a DIRECT e-mail address, as a JPEG attachment to illustrate is essential as the head can easily be damaged.