FS100 + Cineroid Enhanced? Any one using? Anyone fried one yet?

Matthew Bennett

Matthew Bennett

Well-known member
Unfortunately I fried my prev. generation Cineroid, using it with the FS100 during a test.

Don't know exactly why it happened, how could I? It was a glitchy hookup to the FS to begin with. The cables were good quality, tight, but it seems like there was some weird communication going on that made the signal jump all over the place.

THE RESULT - a fried Cineroid that will only display a garbled screen, forever.

Cineroid was kind enough to send me an enhanced version, albeit a couple of months of waiting + countless time-wasting nags and emails to the nearly non-existent US office, but they eventually got it out to me. Yes, it was under warranty. Thanks Cineroid! I like the new one.



Anyway, anyone using? Please tell. I'm scared to death to hook it up.


Oh and here's that previous one... :(

Cineroid_wrecked.jpg
 
I'll say up front I'm a Cineroid dealer, but even if I wasn't it wouldn't change the rest of this email.

I have known a couple people who have fried their 7D cameras with a bad HDMI cable, it's not only possible this happened to your Cineroid, my guess is that a bad cable/adapter is probably the culprit.

Like firewire cables HDMI transmit power and if you've got a cable or adapter that's experienced some trauma it's a good idea to retire it until it can be tested for shorts, or just retire it permanently. HDMI is far from a professional connection, but it's what we're stuck with until manufacturers give every camera HDSDI. If manufacturers don't want to give HDSDI, I really think they ought to consider a more robust consumer grade connection to replace HDMI like HDBaseT (1080p+ over Cat6). It all starts at the camera, as soon as a camera manufacturer decides to adopt a new standard 3rd parties will respond with compatible products.

As for your experience with Cineroid, I hope that you understand that Cineroid is not a direct sales company. They utilize a distribution channel so that re-sellers can be the first line of support in case of problems. Did you try contacting your dealer first? If this happened within a fairly short length of time (probably 30-days, but maybe longer, perhaps much longer) I would be surprised if your dealer wouldn't try to assist you in this return-repair process, especially if they still had the item in stock.

While clearly it has no relation to your experience, since we're talking about post-sale support I feel it's worth interjecting that with both retail and on-line prices there's no free lunch, you often get what you pay for. I'm always shocked how many people buy (or rather attempt to save $50) purchasing expensive gray-market photo equipment from retailers like "Crazy Eddies" or non-authorized dealers in the on-line bucket shops, usually in Brooklyn (or New Jersey). If you don't know what I'm talking about take a look at this link http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/. It's the shady underbelly of the photo/video retail business. Business practices are not always on the up and up. Customers/BBB report from many of of these companies are scathing - people receiving incomplete orders, used equipment sold as new, never receiving their order, and no phone/email/support after the sale. Many don't even have a phone number on their website. Buyers beware.
 
Thanks Illya!

To tell God's honest truth, I bought through Abelcine, (instead of you) in NY to save a couple of bucks, and they could process my credit card faster, etc.

But, with Abelcine, after fourteen days, if the unit doesn't blow up the minute you receive it, you are at the mercy of Cineroid USA for warranty. And what a cruel mercy it was. Abelcine was helpful though, don't get me wrong, but they can't really do anything other than email you a phone number that leads to a dead end. Which I now from your post is simply a distribution network... Yes, after some hard, hard words directed to Joseph at Cineroid, Cineroid eventually hooked me up very nicely. Truth be told, actually they never even managed to get their deadbeat single US employee (joesph from Cineroid will actually back me up on this..) to pick up the fried Cineroid I sent back. Eventually it just got sent back to me. Now I have a new one and a cineroid paperweight. It's a lovely product, lots of new options, updatable, and does analogue in which is damn helpful for my vintage cameras!!

But that's all in the past. A terrible, frightening past that makes me cry fresh tears at the altar of Zacuto :)


On to cables!

I was using a pristine mini-HDMI to full HDMI cable. What else can a man do? - other than look at the cable and say - hmm, the dog hasn't been at this, I think it should definitely transmit a video signal of some kind without blowing stuff up.

Any thoughts Illya? Forgive me but I know very little of all the elements in play for HDMI devices and cables...

Are there any cables that might guard against throwing power into a unit like the 'roid that might not be able to handle it? Any way to insulate the cable chain? Any brands to recommend?

ANy knowledge you have to share - a thousand thank yous!!
 
There are many different HDMI cables out there and some that have better shielding and machine made ends- which helps. But really it's a connector designed to sit in one place and not be stressed, it just not a good connector system for shooting. There's also quite a bit of variation between different manufacturers of the female and male components and even the supposed "locking" connectors aren't so hot. Cables need stress relief, otherwise they fail. The components they are plugged into can also receive damage, my surround sound receiver recently developed a faulty HDMI port, and I've never moved it since the day it was unboxeed.

I'll share a lesson learned from the Q.C. department at a rental company I used to work at. The Q.C. department had to check to make sure our Panasonic 1200A DVCProHD deck was in perfect shape for a rental. The Q.C. tech plugged in a brand new firewire cable into the deck and there was no signal. The deck seemed to be working fine in all other regard, so he decided to re-seat the firewire card- again no change. So he tried swapping the card for the back- up firewire card that was located in storage, still no change. This seemed really weird so he decided to mark the deck as bad for an engineer to check later and he grabbed another 1200A off the shelf, he plugged in the firewire cable and again- no signal.

Since he had tried 2x decks and 3x firewire cards he decided that it must be a faulty cable, so he went and got another cable and checked both decks and the spare card again.... no change.

When the engineer got the 1200A decks on his bench he discovered that both decks had Firewire cards that were totally fried. This seem weird so he called over the tech and asked for the story on the decks, because they were both sitting on the shelf and as recently as the day before had been reported working perfectly. Engineer asked to see the cables used to check the decks.

The cables got plugged into what was probably a sub $100 cable checker and one of the cables (the first brand new one from the package) had a short. Turns out the short fired about $6000 worth of card in less than 10-minutes. This cable was brand new and never used by anyone before.

Bottom line, don't blame Cineroid for what was probably caused by a cable. I've heard that the most common Canon 7D failure is at the HDMI port. There are fairly cheap HDMI cable checkers out there and I know it seems like a waste of money and a hassle but if you're livelihood depends on gear working it's not a bad idea.

Also, I know Joseph and he is incredibly hard working and dedicated to his job. It's a shame that you had this experience, I know that Joseph would not want to see any of his end users unhappy. Cineroid is making some incredibly innovative products and the EVF you purchased was the very first product they have ever sold in this country. We are all lucky to have Joseph because the alternative is having to deal with the manufacturer overseas, which introduces additional issues like time zones, language barriers and intercontinental shipping. I'm glad you got a new EVF and the new version of the firmware to boot. I just received the new HDSDI version and it's a fantastic improvement.

I've got some fairly decent cables at the office right now, as far as these things go, but I can't recall the brand. I'll check when I get back to the office on Monday. Also, you may want to consider an HDMI to HDSDI (and HDSDI to HDMI) converter. The market seems to be flooded with these and Atomos just introduces one at IBC that's $349 that will clip onto the back of your Cineroid. In the spirit of full disclosure I'm also an Atomos dealer, but I'm yet to add the company or products to my website, so it's not like anyone would ever know anyway. Marshall, Blackmagic and AJA are making these converters too, the Marshall seems very impressive but it is much more expensive as well, I am a Marshall dealer, but like Atomos you won't actually find any products from them listed on my website- 97% of my business is word of mouth, hopefully someday soon I'll get the website in shape. My days are currently filled with designing and building new products, which is really time consuming, updating the website has lost out for now.
 
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My god what a horror story!

Thanks again for all this insight.

I'm going to stay away from the hdmi roulette wheel and just analogue in from the fs100 - that should be safe. hmmm... right?
 
Matthew Bennett said:
My god what a horror story!

Thanks again for all this insight.

I'm going to stay away from the hdmi roulette wheel and just analogue in from the fs100 - that should be safe. hmmm... right?
Click to expand...

Power doesn't travel in parallel with an analog signal. Just keep in mind it's possible to damage any HDMI device, although I'll also add that if you are prudent with cable and usage it isn't all that likely to occur. I've also heard rumors that some of the largest CE manufacturers have just started trying to limit damage from bad HDMI cables (probably circuit breaker of some sort) after the HDMI ports in case of a problems, but I don't know exactly what/how those safe guards might be implemented.

Of the several hundred people I've met with Canon cameras 3 have told me about faulty HDMI causing a short in the camera. And three other people have related to me me that they know someone that damaged their Canon camera via the HDMI port. That's a lot of problems from anecdotal evidence, but still fairly low numbers. Google 'fried HDMI' if you'd like to read more horror stories about HDMI and people who were just plugging in a cable- and thought that everything would be okay.
 
Ha! Yeah, the exploding HDMI port on the ps3 jumped to the top of the google list. Pretty crazy.

In aesthetics news, I plugged the analogue in from the fs100 into the Cineroid, and it was just so low-res, blurry, non-focusable, that I had a mental breakdown of my HDMI barriers and said 'what the hell', and then plugged in a 3ft newtech HDMI cable. Lovely image. Great peaking.

So far it's fine of course. I'm going to stay away from adapters or splitters of any kind and try not to kink the cables too much.
 
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