Jvc gy hd110e

[Tim Lewis]

@Adam

Thanks for that advice. I will do that as soon as my budget allows.

@Ken

Thanks very much for the TC3 details. I will be using this after all the good things I have heard about it.

[Tim Lewis]

@Adam Letch and for all other Focus owners

I have just replaced the hard drive in my DR-HD100 with this:

SD SDHC MMC TO 2 5 44 PIN IDE Male Adapter Converter | eBay

It allows an SDHC card to be used instead of a Hard Drive. The seller claims it will even allow an OS install. That was beyond my needs.

I opened up the hard disc recorder and removed the original hard drive. I then attached the part to the cable ribbon. As components could possibly touch each other from the part and the main circuit board of the recorder, I cut the little anti-static bag that the adapter came in and made an insulator that I attached with adhesive velcro.

It took a couple of times and a bit of fiddling to get the recorder to recognise the drive, but finally it did. I have a 32 GB Class 10 30 Mbps card in the adapter, this is the biggest one I had. I can always change it out later, but it is telling me I have 214 minutes of recording time available, which ought to do for the moment.

I now have a solid state recorder for a little over AUD $60. Well chuffed.

[Bob Hart]

Tim.

If the recorder links to the camera via the firewire port, then you need to be really careful that the plug into the camera or the recorder is not disturbed when one or both are powered. The firewire plug in the camera body is not the most inspired piece of engineering.

It would have seemed like a good idea at the time but the socket itself is not robust. The shield is made of light material. It spreads apart from little more sideload than cable weight or combined tension of a cable upon an elbow plug. Then it no longer holds the plug securely which then permits an intermittent connection and zowk = gonners.

The desperation repair in the field for a loose intermittent connection problem was to squeeze the spread socket together with ratnose pliers. You only got a few goes at that before the "cure" became a permanent disability.

The original fitment of the socket style, an elbow pinned style, was secured by halves of a laptop computer case clamping around it firmly, holding the shield in place. Its fitment in the JVC is different. The assembly method for the case is to have a clearance hole for the socket to be poked through during assembly.

Because there is a rolled edge on the thin material, clearance has to be allowed for this rim. Therefore the casework of the camera cannot support the socket. The shield spreads and mechanical loads are also transferred to the mainboard in the camera.

One cheap trick to reinforce the socket against spreading is to cut thin slivers of plastic icecream container and stack them by slipping them in carefully by the long sides of the socket. Another cheap trick is to use a semi-hardening bathroom sealer to add material between the shield and the case. This makes it extremely difficult to dismantle the camera for repair in the future.

My personal preference would be to immobilise the socket shield in the casework with slivers of plastic and maybe a bit of sealastic or bathroom sealer to stop them from falling out. The slivers must be deep enough into the casework to come against the PCB inside. Thinner slivers may drop through inside and be lost. I then would permanently secure the firewire plug itself in its socket with sealastic to prevent any movement. It will mean a hanging cord annoying the hell out of you.

I suspect that part of the issue you discovered with the solid state device you installed not mounting electronically to the camera may have been related to a resistive or intermittent firewire connection at the camera body but maybe not.

When the firewire port goes, it sometimes fries some local parts but sometimes requires the entire mainboard to be replaced.

Please heed the advice of better folk than I on this topic. I did not own a HD100 but had to troubleshoot one a few times. The camera still makes a very pleasing image, especially with Paolo Ciccone's TrueColour picture profile settings entered.

[Jay Webster]

Just a word of caution about these camaras in case no one else mentioned it:
ALWAYS POWER OFF BEFORE CONNECTINF OR DISCONNECTING THE FIREWIRE CABLE OR SWITCHING THE DV/HDV SWITCH!
You will blow the firewire port. It ain't a cheap fix!
Enjoy the camera, I still own and use mine frequently!

[Tim Lewis]

Bob and Jay

I appreciate your advice and have read a lot about this issue in the HD100 section of the forum.

The fix I have done is all inside the DR-HD100 and does not affect its external operation. The areas of concern I had for shorting were against the main circuit board inside the recorder, as the SDHC adapter has a certain amount of circuitry on it too. I also has a nice red LED telling me there is 5V on the circuit. That is why I mounted the insulator layer on the adapter board.

I will look into the ice-cream container fix too. The camera was purchased secondhand as a learning tool, and will not be worthy of repairs, so I do wish to treat it as kindly as possible.

[Tim Lewis]

Well, all good until I went to use it on Tuesday this week, then it wouldn't recognise the disk! I had to go back to tape.

I am yet unwilling to write off this experiment, so I opened up the recorder again and had a look at all the arrangements. I have now taken out the pressed aluminium HD caddy from the back of the recorder casing to remove the possibility of any electrical shorting there and it all seems to be working again.

I will take it out over the weekend to see if it will perform as required after some transport.

[Tim Lewis]

I have successfully used the camera in the field with the SD card as a replacement for the old hard drive.

The recorder also starts up much more quickly.

[Bob Hart]

Just to stress-test the card so you don't get any bad surprises, maybe try a slow pan whilst lens is in wide view so there is lots of fine high contrast texture going past slow enough that motion blur does not help the codec skip some data. I think JVC's keyframe is one in five - somebody please correct me on this. If you have loose items floating in the drive enclosure, your could cut up from black hard foam. The downside of that stuff is that it may thermally insulate and cause heat to build up if the card is inclined to get hot during recording. A cheap and nasty trick I use when prototyping something is to use small blots of white water-clean-up white silicone bathroom sealer. It is easy to part off if you need to dismantle. Hot glue is good too. You need to let it dry off if you put it anywhere near electrical conductors in case it slumps though a thin skin-setting onto a circuit after you close the box back up before it sets firm.