known issues with the DVX 100 A
 

I've been shooting with a Canon GL2 for the last couple of years making 3 minute mini-docs for our website. Over all I'm pretty happy with what I've been able to acomplish with it. A different (and ironically unrelated) web group in my organization wants to start doing similar work and has asked me to help them select a camera. However, I am not inclined to recommend a GL2 for them because of the known issue of the tape eject problem that everyone seems to have, Canon never seems to fix, and I wish I'd known about before I bought it. Live and learn.

The DVX100A has made it to my short list (along with Canon's XL2 and Sony's PD170) and I'm now trying to figure out what its known issues are. I've done some general reading, plus searches on things like "trouble" and "help" and "broke" and "known issue" and I find no one complaining about anything about this camera at all. Is it really that perfect? Or am I not thinking of the right things to search for?

Thanks for any thoughts or help.
Smile,
Kris

The biggest (and almost only) gripe I have with it is the headphone echo. If you're shooting in 24P mode, the audio in the headphones is delayed two frames from "live" (so that it sync's properly on tape). If you have noise-isolating headphones it's fine, but if you're hearing live audio leaking through your headphones, it'll sound like an echo and drive you batty. Well, at least it drove me batty, until I got a set of Etymotic in-ear phones.

The other thing to watch for is noise. If you have adequate exposure on your subject it's superb, but if there's not adequate exposure you can get quite a bit of image noise.

As far as things breaking -- no, not really. I dropped mine once, and heard from several people who dropped theirs -- the things just don't break. They're made of a cast magnesium alloy, and are very, very tough.

Only thing to watch out for is if you're a mac user, then you never want to plug in the camera into the firewire port when it's on. Apparently something about macs can cause blown firewire ports on the DVX. Make sure the camera and computer are off and you should never have an issue, but hot-plugging on a mac may cause issues. I've hot-plugged it into a PC about 3,000 times and never had a problem, so it seems to be specifically related to the combination of DVX+mac.

The main problem I have had with the DVX is controlling the reds, most DV cameras have that problem but the DVX is worse than most. Some post can help but dont expect to maintain much detail is poppy reds... overall the camera is a solid performer with a robust community.


ash =o)

Barry covered things very well. The only thing I might add that some complain about is the noisy headphone amp. At higher volumes you'll hear some hiss while monitoring with headphones. Fortunately it is isolated to the headphone output and does not go to tape.

Oh, and buy Barry's book!

backfocus,zoom,sound
 

1. I´ve had bacfocus problems with 3 different DVX`s.
2. When you start a zoom the start of the zoom is "hard" (I use a manfrotto zoom control to ease the movement.)
3.When filming in loud enviroments, the sound input level is to high(even while -50db). It overrides easily. I have an -25db gadgette/thing(stick it in to the XLR) to use in such places,works fine .
-Sony`s PD150/170 Have the ATT function. The DVX misses that.
Still... I love the DVX