Broken Camera?

PaPa

PaPa

Major Contributor
Just got back from a gig today. During the shoot, my Canon XH A1 would simply function. The thumb button, trust me, was on standby and not lock. I could throw the wheel in VCR mode, playback everything, look at the screen, etc... The second i threw the wheel into any recording mode, neither the LCD screen, nor the viewfinder gave me any image. Sound was still being heard through my headphones to XLR microphone and there was timecode on the display of the wheel, but there was no reaction to pushing the record button and no display of the image.

Anyone encounter this before? It was working for one moment and then the next time i turned it on, that was it.

I have another shoot coming up this weekend and i fear ill have to send it to canon for repairs...

damn.
 
Never had it happen, weve used the Canon XL AH (the one previous to yours i think), a lot but never those problems. My director and CGI guy both seem to hate canon though for some reason. (They usually shoot on an HVX200), they hate it so much they got a D300s instead of a canon DSLR, even though i tried to tell them the canon video is far superior.

Anyway, maybe this is what they are talking about?

Anyway to hard reset the device? Were your monitors (do you have any?) displaying anything? If you record, and then rewind and play back do you see an image?

Maybe a loose cable somewhere to the displays or something.
 
Hi

I've had the same kind of problem about 1,5 years ago. The cam went dead in all record modes. Playback did work and sometimes the display inside the "wheel" worked as I could see the sond level meters move.

The solution was to send it to Canon for repair. As they told me it was pretty simple (for them that is). It was bad contact in a connector inside the camcorder that connects the motherboard with the optics. When this happends the camcorder won't start up. Unfortenately it's something Canon has to fix and I think that is a big problem as the fault probably can show up just any time.
 
Thanks Bo, i think that is probably what's going on here.

Hopefully it's not very costly!!!!
 
PaPa said:
Thanks Bo, i think that is probably what's going on here.

Hopefully it's not very costly!!!!
Click to expand...

Yea...good luck with that. I've learned the hard way that there's no such thing as a "simple" repair when it comes to Canon. The last time the only thing they did was reinstall the firmware on my A1 and it came out to about $500. A firewire replacement went for about $300. At least they'll expedite your repair if you're a member of the XL Owners Club (if you've registered when you bought the A1) and they'll give you a loaner camera in the meantime.
 
hmm. they normally call and give me the details of the repair price before going ahead with it. Hopefully it's under 500. Otherwise is not a huge deal, all tax deductible anyway. Keeping my fingers crossed.
 
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