I heard the best way of cleaning vcr heads without open it, is to use a head cleaner tape and then run a new tape all the way but I don't know if that works well. I cleaned my ag-1980 twice yesterday when I got it. On the first pass it the frames looked better but then I decided to re-clean it and I don't know if the dots where there before but there are white dots appearing in the frames at ramdom could it be the head was old anyway? please advice what to do I want to change heads if needed to make my ag new again... PS! How do I use my AG-1980 as a TBC for my SLV-R1000 it'll be like combining the best of both worlds if I'm successful... front inputs on the AG didn't work... the image still unstabilized!