We just blew the firewire port on our GY-HD100 after plugging in a DR HD100.
JVC warns about turning off the camera when plugging in the cable, but the operator may not have noticed it. With the DR HD100, you end up plugging and unplugging the cable over and over and it really is a big risk.

The problem is that there is voltage on the 6 PIN ports and if the connector shorts, it instantly kills the chip. They have port isolators to remove the voltage, but I wish makers like Focus would just not use this pin with voltage.
The port isolators are bulky. I don't know if they make a M/M cable. The ones I've seen are M/F.

Dave,
They ship this camera with warnings EVERYWHERE, I think we saw like 6 when we got the camera. Focus warns about this. Everyone warns about this. Sorry to hear that you blew your 6 pin, but it is pretty well known and has talked about quite a bit.

I know, but when you have 5 or 6 people checking out the gear, it's hard to keep everyone from plugging in a cable before checking. In a rushed production environment, hot swapping cables is really needed. Just for the simple fact that you have 20 other things going on at the same time, it's easy to miss and BAM - you're dead in one sec.


They should find a way to prevent this. Or at least minimize it.

Dave

They should find a way to prevent this. Or at least minimize it.

Dave

Agreed, but it seems as most things, firewire has it's limitations. That's one of them. USB provides power and I don't hear of that going out too much, so you would think they could do something.

Agreed, but it seems as most things, firewire has it's limitations. That's one of them. USB provides power and I don't hear of that going out too much, so you would think they could do something.


I bought a firewire "no power" cable to help with this. It's supposed to eliminate the power that is transfered between the camera and the firestore.

Actually the GY-HD100 doesnt have that many warnings, its in the manual but you need to read the whole book to find it. The new ones have extra papers inside but mine didnt. Personally I dont know why theres power in either end theres nothing to power. from what Firestore told me on the phone(I dont own one) there isnt supposed to be power on the CAMERA port of the Firestore only the drive port.