I just used my new pd170 last weekend for a wedding, and it was great! The quality of the footage was excellent, and all the low-light talk around here is very true. I was capturing clear images in light that was blowing away the same shots from an XL-1 videographer there as well. Actually, what I noticed was not so much that the low-light shooting was better, but that the gain was so much cleaner. With both of us pointed at the same scene with no gain, they looked close. But when he turned up his gain, it went yellow, pale, and noisy. His footage at 6db was as grainy as mine at 12db, and I still had better color saturation! Overall, I was very, very happy with the feel and performance of my 170. But...

I did have one problem that came up several times... that blasted Fader button! Why did Sony put such an amateurish feature on such a high-end camcorder?? Who is going to drop $3k on a camcorder and use the built-in fader?

Anyhow, rant aside, is there any way to disable that button? I accidentally hit it several times during shooting, and it was very frustrating watching my resulting footage. I suppose through more use and practice, I will learn to avoid it, but in the mean time, I wondered if there was a way to disable it. And while I'm at it, the Backlight and Spotlight buttons could be disabled as well, although I didn't have any issues with them.

Thanks,
Dan

The only answer is to cover the buttons with something. I suspect you could get by with just glueing a square cross-section piece of plastic along side those buttons and that would protect them from inadvertent actuation but still allow you to actuate them if you wished. Probably something about 1/8 inch cross section and as long as those group of buttons would do it.

Ok, I did think of something like that, but I hate to alter the shiny, new camera at this point. I was just hoping there was a menu option hidden somewhere that would disable them, but no luck.

Thanks for the tip though... my thought was to pop out the buttons themselves, but you're idea is much less destructive!

Dan

A small piece of gaffers tape works great. I even use it on my JVC5000 to block out certain buttons I really don't want to press when shooting. I feel the tape and its like a small jolt to me. NO NO NO! ;-)

Don

Yes, forget the fader button and the silly backlight button, but don't ignore that amazingly clever spotlight button. The program built into this button is wonderful, and if you do some tests in a room lit only with a bare bulb, you'll see how clever it is.

tom.