What is the best brand of MiniDV Tapes?

Is there a hope that my mini-DV tapes can be played with normal quality?

• I owned a camcorder Samsung SCD-6040. It worked fine. I dropped it and the video doesn't work anymore. The problem is that I didn't transfer my miniDV tapes to my PC and I had 1 year of important souvenirs (especially, 1 month at the World cup in South Africa). So I bought the same (same brand, same model) used camcorder on eBay. When I play my tapes on it and watch it on TV, there are dropout (small rectangles that appear on the image) for all my tapes! Before I dropped my camcorder, I saw my tapes on TV fine. So I thought that the new camcorder doesn't work well. But the eBay vendor told me that it worked fine before he sent it to me. So I offer to do the following test: use 1 of his new tape and record 2 minutes of video, and replay it on TV. The 2 minutes were fine! So now, I'm upset because I think that for about 1 year after the drop, my tapes were stored and somethiing happened to them. Is there a hope that my tapes can be good or restored? It's hard to lose important souvenirs. If the tapes are really damaged, how did it happen?

• Answer:

  your tapes will not be damaged ..or if they are they were already , with age or from the lubricant the tapes , and heads have , you will wearing , and stretching , and general wear , which will result in losing squares , in this case , the problem may only be that your heads are dirty ,and in this case a cleaning tape , or some pure alcohol will clean them up . if then there are squares and dropout the tapes are not able to be recovered for the quality as the damage is there already by age or degeneration (where the recorded data had been lost permanently) this will happen with time ,and depends on how good your tapes are originally to maintain integrity over time .. once they have degenerated the quality and playback is set , and restoration is impossible providing it is the tapes