I just bought my FX1 in May. Since this summer has had me running around I haven't had a chance to really use the camera until last night when my cousin asked me to record his comedy performance. I wanted to record on a standard mini-dv but down-convert from HDV to DV. When I went into the menu to do this (in Camera mode) and I selected the "on" for the convert button, the indicator light on the outside stayed on HDV and I saw this message in the menu: "changes not allowed. unplug i link cable".

What does this mean? I never even plugged an i link cable into it? Is this a problem? A known glitch? Is my camera defective?

I proceeded by going further into the menu and selecting DV, which then changed the outside indicator light to DV.

Is this how it is supposed to be done?

Yep, we've all seen that ominous warning and wondered what it meant :-) The Z1 does the same thing (and also when you switch from PAL to NTSC). I think Sony was just covering themselves; they want you to be sure to unplug the firewire cable before changing modes. That message is displayed, as you noticed, regardless of whether a firewire cable is connected or not.

But there are reports of people blowing the firewire port on their FX1 and Z1 when connecting to a computer, so that's something you should be careful about (see: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=64884 for example). To play it safe, turn both the camera and computer off before connecting or disconnecting them. But as long as nothing is connected to your camera I think it's safe to disregard the warning message.

Ok. That seems to makes more sense. Thanks.

One more thing. When should the HDV or DV indicator lights be active? Switching the HDV-DV downconvert to "on" did not turn on the DV indicator light as someone else told me it would. However, (and obviously) the DV indicator light was activated when I switched the record mode from HDV to DV. Is this as it should be?