does this sound possible at all?

[letsburnbridges]

i just read this on 2-pop and it really doesnt sound very possible, but i thought id run it by you guys...

"yes but we’ve have the camera taken apart fully and what appears to be a multi-functional Sony engine - this can fully accommodate any option in Software (including 24P mode), if Sony decides to unlock that."

so anyway, unlock what exactely, I'm not sure, but as far as chipset, he said the chips are analog (not digital), and they can do far more than they are doing now. In any event, next time he comes on I'll ask him some more and post it all here. Maybe Italian (European) FX-1's have some added capabilities ? But this guy says no, and that they are all the same, and that the capability is supposed to be secret until they "unlock" the capability, so that is the only reasonI asked. By unlock, I am assuming some hidden function, and not a sort of lock and key thing."

hmm..?

[Barry_Green]

Well, back in the early, early, early days of DV, the European cameras had DV-input disabled. The story we always heard was that there was some big tax that got imposed if the cameras had firewire input enabled; they'd get classified as VCRs or something.

It was very frustrating for PAL users -- they could digitize their tapes, but they couldn't output their finished product back to tape.

So www.dvcentral.org put out a challenge to all hackers -- find a way to enable DV input. And someone did. He used a service remote control and figured out what the settings were, and changed one, and all of a sudden people were able to employ a little hack and enable DV input.

So, there's speculation that the FX1 and the Z1 are probably very, very similar under the skin, and that the added features on the Z1 may also be present on the FX1, just "disabled"... and maybe there's some way to "enable" them. Maybe that's what they were referring to.

However, turning an analog CCD into progressive-scan through a firmware hack would seem to be really, really, really optimistic. I doubt that's gonna happen. But if they're enterprising enough, maybe they can figure out how to enable 50i/60i on FX1s, etc.

[thisiswells]

Ahhh, the ol' Sony RM95 service remote--the VX1000 hackers paradise.