BillGrady.com

The Suspects… One Night Only!

Posted by Bill under News

Come see The Suspects this Friday, December 21st at The Continental Club in Houston. It’s deja vu all over again, and you shouldn’t miss it a second time!

Sharp VL-Z3 Dew Repair

Posted by Bill under How-Tos, News

Back in 2004 I posted about how hard it was to find the manual for my Sharp VL-Z3 MiniDV camera on the Sharp website, and how much better the Canadian branch of the Sharp corporate machine was at providing that kind of information. It’s now time to add a little bit more to the Sharp info pile: here’s a confirmed fix for the deadly “Sharp VL-Z DEW Message” problem.

On just about any video camera out there, you will occasionally see a “DEW” warning in the viewfinder when the sensors think there’s too much humidity present for normal operations. The Sharp VL-Z series cameras can take this to an illogical extreme: the dew sensor goes nuts and it always thinks there’s too much humidity for normal operations. Thankfully, there’s a solution to this issue and it does not involve boxing up your camera and sending it in for repair… If you’ve got a soldering iron and the realization that you’ve nothing to lose, you can repair your camera in about two minutes. It worked for me!

 UPDATE - An unseen side-effect of my “fix”… my standby function no longer works! I left my camera in the on position after playing a video, and when I came back 5 hours later my camera was hot to the touch and wouldn’t even load a tape. Buyer beware!

UPDATE - Bollocks! My dew warning has come back, and I’m shopping for a new camera. (January 14 2008)