I have in my care a 900 that would seem to have had the ENG SECURITY in the OPTION MENU set to ON which disables the opening of any menus other than USER. The manual says consult the dealer which i have done but they are making a call to the Factory in Osaka... which is going to take way too much time.

Ordinarily the trick is to hold in the switch buttons RESET and LIGHT above the 'VTR' LCD and then do a l o n g push on the from MENU button which should bring up the OPTION MENU and the ENG SECURITY ON or OFF choice.

Set to OFF none of the Engineering setups are locked so whenever anyone does a solo l o n g press (>3sec) on th front MENU it gets you into all of the cameras adjustable engineering settings. It would seem a previous maintenance person has locked these out for safety...

I'm kind of desperate so i don't know but i would really appreciate if anyone recalls how to re-access the OPTION MENU.. TIA

For the Forum's future reference i have found this and confirm it works on the SPX800/900 SD and does so also on an AJ-PX5000G, Pana's newest flagship HD camera-corder.... Apologies i can't recall the website source i found it at to give them a thankyou....



Problem - previous owner had locked-out the main menus by activating the 'engage security' feature, to stop people fiddling with his settings. Didn't change it back before selling the camera, via a dealer. This meant when I bought the camera, I could only access the limited 'User 1' menu, despite trying all the normal variations of button pushing.

Solution, from Panasonic, via the good folk at Top-Teks.

1. Power the camera off
2. Set the 'bars' switch on the side to 'bars'
3. Hold the white balance switch on the front down into 'black balance' for 5 seconds or so
4. Power the camera back on whilst continuing to hold the black balance down. release the black balance.
5. Press the light button on the side panel and hold in whilst then pushing the 'menu' button on the front
6. The 'option' menu will then pop up, from where you select 'engage security' and set it very definitively to OFF!