Strange fault: colours off and blurry during shoot

[Nihil_Baxter]

2 days ago while shooting for a customer in a studio environment my 4.5 year old DVX100 suddenly exhibited a very strange behaviour. The picture in my viewfinder was suddenly blurry, the colours were off (as if out of phase), like green and blue were not aligned anymore and I think red was completely gone.

I didn`t have time to check further since my customer was standing right next to me and I didn`t want to make a fuzz about it, of course. I switched the camera off and on and the fault was gone. After about an hour the same thing happened again, so I restarted the camera once again, which solved the problem. After that I was able to finish the job without any more hickups. Unfortunately I can't post any screen cap here since I don't have the footage.

Since I was connected to AC all the time I first figured it might be my power supply, so right now I have been running my camera at home for about a day now, hooked to AC, but the problem won`t reappear. Of course I am very worred about this mysterious thing which I can`t even seem to duplicate.

During that shoot I was connected to a macbook pro via firewire cable. The preview window in Premiere which we were doing the capture with showed that exact same colour / blurry problem, so the problem is not in my viewfinder.

Could it be that a firewire connection which is technically unidirectional while capturing can influence or kind of mess up my camera's electronics?

Any other idea? My warranty has expired long ago, of course

 

[NoNoob]

Sorry for your misfortune.
Sounds like it worked out okay in the end.

If the camera is functioning normally when not connected via Firewire- I'd look at that variable as the cause of the problem.
If you now hook it back up to the laptop and the condition persists- that proves it.

Your AC source causing the problem is a much narrower chance.
It'll either give up the ghost or not, but nothing in between (no partial voltage).
In fact, it's design is such that it doest that- on purpose.
There are two MOS-FET caps in there that'll "die" before sending spurious strength voltage to the camera, and one of them will croak before it sends too low a DC voltage through.
*Chances of either are pretty remote, btw.

Do a search here on FIREWIRE connectivity. Might find mention of the condition there.

Good luck- and report back on results please.

 

[justin518]

wouldn't be the first signs of a chip going bad, could it?