Problems with the HXR-NX5?

Adam Welz posted a report at dvxuser.com on a problem he's having with the HXR-NX5 he just bought. After noting that the camera behaved badly when he powered it off in the middle of a recording. That's an annoyance, but he then went on to describe a second problem he'd encountered where he had a "buffer overrun" or "buffer overload" error message while dual recording to the FMU unit and an SDHC card.

The camera then remained frozen for a few minutes -- even after I turned the main power switch off. This message remained on the screen until I got fed up and removed the battery to shut it down.

When I restarted the camera, the touchscreen gave me the option to choose to recover the clip, to which I said 'yes' -- but this just cycled back to the same screen three times before finally coming back to the same black screen with the 'recovery in progress' -- which I had to stop again by pulling the battery off after turning the power switch off did nothing.

When I restarted again there was no option to recover the clip again -- and no sign of the clip at all on either the SD card or either the FMU128 unit, to which I was recording simultaneously.

He's understandably concerned.

A message like "buffer overrun" suggests the problem occurred while trying to write to either the SDHC card or the FMU. At the moment, it's anyone's guess why it happened. I recommended reformatting the card and FMU (if he hadn't done so after the first "crash" caused by the power off), and to also try a different card (or even a Memory Stick Pro card) to see if that makes a difference.

If he can't isolate the conditions of the problem (i.e. it happens all the time, or only when doing "x") it's going to be hard to get it fixed!


As an aside about the first issue; someone recently complained to me about the EX1 having a similar problem (of losing a clip) if you turn off the camera in the middle of recording. These memory based cameras act more like computers in that the file can be completely corrupted if the camera doesn't "finish" writing the file. Interestingly, this same person said that the JVC flash-based cameras don't have the problem.

But this all points to an underlying "problem": it seems to me that what used to be unique/focused devices are acting more and more like computers pretending to be these devices. i.e. a camera is really now a computer with a lens attached to it, rather than a camera with a computer chip in it....my new Blu-ray player acts more like a computer than the DVD player it replaced. There's much more thinking, and flashing of "I'm doing something, wait" messages with this device, and it opens with a computer-like start screen, all of which I find really annoying.

Sometimes it seems like we take two steps forward, and one giant step back.